


If Darkness Never Falls

by Dardrea



Series: If Darkness Never Falls [2]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV), Rumbelle - Fandom
Genre: Adventurer!Belle, Enchanted Forest AU, F/M, Mentions of Sleeping Warrior, Milah/Killian Jones, Pre/No Dark Curse, Spinner!Rum, fairy tale land au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-18
Updated: 2015-05-23
Packaged: 2018-03-23 14:17:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3771379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dardrea/pseuds/Dardrea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set in the time/years following Averted. Belle is trying to rebuild her lands after the ogres are banished and she isn't willing to use magic to do it, but they still have the dagger and the enslaved Dark One lurking around. How do you solve a problem like the Dark One? (And if you really can't guess you haven't been paying attention.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Regarding the rating: this chapter is pretty much rated G. The next chapter will feature sexual situations. The rating is a heads-up for what's to come.

A year still couldn’t undo the damage of the ogre wars.

A year rebuilding, replanting, repopulating; a year, and all that time with the means to make it all better with no more than the wave of a hand lurking in the shadows of her castle, watching her with a smirk and shining eyes as she steadfastly refused to pay any further price for his magic.

Her parents and people had been the cost of ridding their land of the ogres and duke’s iron control. She would sacrifice no more for an ‘easy answer.’

But that still left her the problem of the Dark One.

 

* * *

 

Belle didn’t like leaving her spinner to bear the dagger. She hadn’t really thought about what it would mean, turning the dagger over to him. As much as the old imp plagued her, she knew he was a worse burden on her spinner, who actually guarded the dagger.

She was torn. On the one hand, she could offer no better protection to him that the Dark One’s power at his beck and call, and she knew he needed protection. His reputation was well know and though she had no problem making it clear that anyone who raised a hand or even word against him would face a few nights in her dungeons at the very least, as refugees and new settlers returned to her land it took time for some to understand the way of things and it was understandable that a lame man who was known to have run from battle in a land still recovering from being overrun was not going to be popular.

On the other hand, the Dark One lingered, always lingered. He watched his master more even than he watched her, though she wasn’t sure he didn’t do it in part because he knew how it bothered her. He was certainly never far when the two of them were together, which put a damper on her efforts to get closer to the man that everyone called a coward, but who had faced down the duke’s men and the Dark One himself to save his son…and a little bit perhaps to save her as well.

For a while she was too busy to worry too much about it, her head almost spinning with all the details of putting her home back together, rebuilding the town and outlying villages, finding places for people to stay and providing incentives for people with the right skills to come and ply their trades. She’d been raised to rule her land, not to have to build it up from as good as nothing but it was a challenge she meant to rise to.

Among the first people she brought back were the ones necessary to restaff the castle, soldiers as well as builders, but also maids and footmen, kitchen staff, a housekeeper and a butler.

She found a treasure in a sturdy, middle aged widow named Mrs. Potts, a woman who had a stern sort of beauty and a brisk, no-nonsense attitude that only somewhat disguised her soft heart. She was a mother of six, her oldest was one of the first Belle had hired on as a castle guard and he’d introduced his family to her and given her a housekeeper, a footman, a groom, two maids, and a kitchen boy, all in one swoop.

Mrs. Potts took control of the castle with all the skill of a general rallying her troops and Belle supposed it could only help that the woman had birthed and raised half the staff.

With the castle well in hand Belle was free to turn her attention to setting the rest of her lands to rights.

But there was still the problem of the Dark One.

 

* * *

 

She hadn’t intended to draw any sort of attention to her spinner—but she couldn’t keep from calling him that and it gave her away. The first time she’d done it in the presence of someone else had been accident. But it was a fair reflection of her feelings. He was hers. Her friend. Her spinner. Her…just hers.

He was a godsend in her efforts to rebuild. An advisor, patient, unassuming, and far more knowledgeable about what it took to make a town run than she was.

She devoted herself to studying the situation in her books, but in the meantime, he already knew. He knew what jobs were the backbones of the other industries that had once made Avonlea flourish. He was able to tell her that if her former apothecary wasn’t among the ones who returned the old wood witch who had come back would suffice in the meantime, but the mill would _have_ to be rebuilt and a new miller found as soon as possible. A blacksmith was a necessity and his apprentice wasn’t skilled enough to pass muster.

She’d never had to worry about gold before, with a constant, steady supply flowing into her family’s coffers, but now with only gold to pay and none to collect yet, he protected her more than once from being taken advantage of by unscrupulous merchants asking prices she didn’t know enough to bargain down.

He seemed to know every step it took to turn the fruits of the earth and the field and farm into all the wonders of modern life and it was such a help she didn’t even have the words to tell him what a relief it was to have him there, trustworthy and calm if still over-timid. She learned early on she had to make sure to ask his opinion because he wasn’t always quick to volunteer it but he always answered her honestly, more clever than even he gave himself credit for.

There was a power in his unwilling position that made him more influential than he was comfortable with but it did slowly quiet the crueler words that would otherwise have been levied against him.

Bae split his time between his father’s fine new house—she’d insisted, as long as she was rebuilding the town anyway, a spinner was absolutely essential as far as she was concerned, _her_ spinner in particular—and Belle’s castle, training with her guard to his father’s quiet displeasure and the boy’s delight.

Slowly life began to settle into its familiar rhythms. There were more graveyards with more fresh graves than had been seen in so short a time, memorials built for bodies that would never be found, an empty master bedroom in the castle that Belle had not been willing to claim as her own, and many familiar faces that never would return to Avonlea or its surrounding lands and smaller villages, replaced by new and sometimes even foreign ones, but the land was fertile and ready to be tended, livestock was born and needed care, and life went on.

Her land recovered, and even if they would never see it, Belle was certain her parents would be proud of what she did. Her natural optimism made her certain that soon her lands would be richer and her people more contented even than before the ogres.

But the Dark One—

 

* * *

 

Well…the Dark One lurked and scampered about, watching, always watching, tittering to himself and making dark proclamations that made her roll her eyes in annoyance but set her people, even her brave spinner, quickly fleeing from his company.

She’d promised she would try to find a way to free him from the curse that he found so burdensome he’d have chosen death over continuing to bear it. He’d snorted at her, clearly unbelieving, though whether he didn’t believe that she would try to destroy so powerful a relic as his dagger or whether he simple doubted she could, he never bothered to say nor she to ask.

They did not get on well.

Of course, he didn’t get on well with anyone, or so she thought, until one night she was stalking through the castle, looking for where Bae had disappeared to when they were supposed to be going over his mathematics and found herself in the kitchen—where the great and terrible Dark One himself was seated at the scarred old work table with Chip, the kitchen boy, Mrs. Potts’ youngest, a book between them that it seemed the Dark One was helping the boy read.

Belle might have scurried in and pulled the poor child away from the Dark One, but his own mother, Mrs. Potts herself, stood right there across the table, kneading out some sort of dough and looking on with…fondness?

And the Dark One—Zoso, for some reason his name popped into her head while she stood watching the lank, greasy tendrils of his hair swaying so close to the boy’s clean, golden locks as the imp bent closer to underline a word with one filthy, clawed finger, helping the boy sound it out—well, his expression was more mild and human than she’d ever seen him.

He noticed her first, his gentle tone cut off abruptly as he jerked his head up to glare at her, eyes narrowed.

Mrs. Potts and Chip looked over at her as well, their gazes drawn by Zoso’s. Chip’s guileless gaze held only a vague curiosity and impatience to get back to his tale of high adventure—that book had been one of her favorites when she’d been his age.

Mrs. Potts however looked almost as hostile as Zoso for a moment, before she schooled her face into something calmer, something cooler. “Can I help you, your grace?”

Belle was so confused by the tableau and the hostility that she stammered. “I—I was looking for Baelfire?”

Mrs. Potts’ expression instantly softened. It was the right thing to have said and possible the only right thing.

“I’ve not seen him this evening. Perhaps he’s gone with Jacques to check on the horses?”

Belle nodded faintly. “I’ll check the stables next. Thank you,” she said, quickly retreating from her own kitchen as though she were the one who’d transgressed.

 

* * *

 

A few days later, having simply decided to ignore the incident rather than worry too much about what she’d so briefly been witness to, she was pouring over a part of her budget for the renovations to the ruined chapel of Avonlea. She’d never been very religious herself but her spinner had quietly suggested that the people often found comfort in worship and Avonlea had long been the principal seat of a certain religious order who’s members had already expressed interest in resettling.

The monks had been craftsmen as well as clergy, and the sisters had been known for their good works around town and the surrounding lands and both branches had a long history with her family. For all her relative indifference to spirituality there did seem to be something…fitting about rebuilding the chapel and waking every morning to the bells, seeing the monks on market day peddling their wares, and the nuns going around on Sundays with alms for the poor—usually supplemented by the castle coffers and often accompanied by her mother.

Working out the budget for it though, was easier said than done. The church that the ogres had destroyed had been a marvel, a masterwork of engineering and craftsmanship, the tower, the dome, the tile work and stained glass and wrought iron. She simple couldn’t afford to rebuild it on that scale now. She would have to think smaller for the moment and keep the idea of a true renovation for later.

A knock at the door interrupted her musings.

She looked up. “Come in,” she called.

Mrs. Potts entered quietly, her head high and her body stiff in a way that warned Belle that a battle was in the offing. For a moment she couldn’t imagine what there was for them to fight over but at the first words from Mrs. Potts—

“No one should be kept as a slave.”

She understood, and leaned back in her seat, giving her housekeeper her full attention. She folded her hands over the papers spread across the desk and nodded. “I agree with you.”

“Then why are you keeping Zoso as a prisoner here?”

No one called him that. As far as she knew only she and Rumpelstiltskin even knew his name. The only other one who could have made a gift of it was the Dark One himself.

“I’m not the one who made him a slave and I don’t have it in my power to free him. I told him I’d try to find a way—”

Mrs. Potts snorted—just as Zoso had done—and Belle raised a brow at her. She was still the duchess here, but her housekeeper didn’t waver.

Belle sighed, and let her own shoulders relax a bit. “I don’t want it to be like this, believe me. I truly have no more choice in the matter than he does. He’s powerful and too dangerous to be allowed to wander free as he is.”

“Who are you to decide that?”

She stiffened again, lifting her head. “I am the mistress of this castle and of these lands. These lands that were ravaged because of his power—though not his will,” she found herself hastening to explain when Mrs. Potts’ eyes widened, apparently not having known that Zoso had driven the ogres against Avonlea at his former master’s command. “You see what I mean? I can’t truly free him. His magic is a chain that will always make him vulnerable to others’ control. Unless I can break those chains and end his magic, he’s a threat to our lands, and I’d rather see one man captive than see all of us under threat again.”

She could tell the other woman wasn’t comforted. Belle had seen many things in her adventures before the ogres came and she liked to think she was not easily surprised and yet…the thought that her sweet but stern housekeeper had developed feelings for the Dark One was…surprising. Bordering on tragic, really, though she wouldn’t shame the proud woman with pity.

For a moment Mrs. Potts stood there, erect and proud, only the wringing of her hands giving away her agitation. Finally she bowed her head a little. “You—you will truly seek a way to free him, though?” she asked quietly and for a moment Belle found it hard to speak.

She cleared her throat to find her voice and licked her lips, glad at least that the housekeeper wasn’t looking at her now. “I must focus on rebuilding for now. But you have my word—as he does—that I will do everything in my power to find the means to free him from his curse and to release him as soon as I am capable of it.”

Mrs. Potts nodded shortly and curtsied and let herself out of the study without another word, shutting the door softly behind her.

Belle sat and stared at the door and tapped her fingers on her desk, drowning her pity with a dull anger. She couldn’t imagine what sort of game he thought he was playing but the Dark One was surely up to some trick with the kind-hearted housekeeper. She would watch him.

 

* * *

 

The next night she had her spinner over for dinner, as she did more nights than she didn’t these days. At first he’d been shy to come to the castle to share meals with her but she had always been a persistent sort and he was even more shy of sharing his smaller table and humbler house with her than he was of sharing hers.

They talked about the rebuilding, the church he’d convinced her to authorize and his own work overseeing the textile mill.

They talked about Bae and though he didn’t like that his son was training in riding and combat, he was always thrilled to hear how he was coming along with this other studies, science and mathematics, history and languages. It delighted him that his boy would grow to be the man of learning that his father would never be, though she often offered to teach him as well.

As always, as the meal progressed from course to course and their conversation from topic to topic, they ended up quite close to each other, knee pressed to knee under the table and hands almost touching beside their plates and silverware. As bowls of fruit in sugared syrup were set before them and the servants withdrew she moved her hand from brushing his to interlacing their fingers, smiling gently into his dark eyes.

He smiled back, the warmth of his glance making her heart speed and her breath shallow—but he withdrew his hand to his lap and nodded his head towards the corner of the room—where the Dark One was, as usual, lurking.

She met his pale-eyed glare with her own. “Get out,” she ordered dangerously, as though she were the one with _the_ dagger tucked at her belt instead of her spinner, but Rumpelstiltskin drew her attention with a gentle touch on her wrist.

“I should go anyway. I’m supposed to be at the site of the new textile mill before dawn to oversee the beginning of the work and make sure things are going where they’re supposed to.”

She tried not to pout as they both stood and she walked him out, not willing to part before they had to. He didn’t think he was good enough for her, though he’d stood at her side for every step since they’d taken the dagger together from the duke of the frontlands’ castle and it frustrated her. Smiles, talk, even kisses when the mood was right and they were alone, but she couldn’t get the man to agree to more.

She deeply resented having to cut her night short because the Dark One refused to keep his distance.

Her spinner kissed the back of her hand, even though the Dark One had followed them and still watched from the shadows of the hall off the grand entryway and she caught his hand and pressed a kiss of her own to his rough palm, allowing herself a moment to hold him to her before she let his hand fall and let him go on his way. One of her guards would accompany him from the stable to his home in town, though she hated having to let him go when she felt so strongly that his place was by her side and she suspected that in his heart he felt the same.

She allowed herself one moment of melancholy before she turned to face the shadows across the entryway, scowling. “What do you _want_ , Dark One?”

“A deal,” he sneered, limping slowly towards her in the darkness as though she wasn’t fully aware that unlike her spinner he had no trouble walking and only limped when he felt like it, for effect.

She crossed her arms across her chest. “I’ll make no deals with you. You have nothing to offer me. And I have nothing that I’m willing to give.”

He shuffled the last few steps until he was looming over her. She was not impressed. Rumpelstiltskin had ordered him not to harm her or anyone else in the castle.

“I will stop bothering you and ‘your spinner,’” he drawled. “I’ll leave you to your nauseating and fruitless courting.”

Her arms uncrossed and she fisted her hands on her hips instead, narrowing her eyes on him. “And in return?”

“In return…you’ll order your annoying housekeeper and her spawn to keep their distance,” he murmured, lowering his head and not meeting her eyes.

She blinked. “…keep _their_ distance?”

“I’m certainly not seeking them out!” he blustered. “I’m an important man with important business. I don’t have time for—for—for such foolishness.”

“Such foolishness as what?” she inquired, lifting a brow.

He waved both his hands in a helpless gesture. “Conversation. Reading. You saw what they’d dragged me into the other night. I don’t need to waste my time talking to a housekeeper or a kitchen boy or a maid or a stableboy or a…”

“A guard?” she offered helpfully, since the oldest boy was the only one he’d left out. It seems he’d met the whole family.

He flinched. “Any of them!” he said roughly. “I don’t have the time or interest to talk to any of them, especially that bossy housekeeper. She’s a pest. A menace. She imagines she knows far more than she does.”

“About?”

“About—” But he caught on and stopped, getting himself under control. “I won’t offer again. Think about it. Call off that woman and her children and I’ll stop interrupting you and that spinner.”

He disappeared in a cloud of purple smoke, dramatic as ever. She waved the last of the cloud away and headed to her library, pondering.

_Could it possibly be that simple?_

 

* * *

 

They’d elected to try it out in the forest, deep, a half a days’ ride beyond any settlement, and halfway to the sea, just in case something went wrong.

Belle and Rumpelstiltskin, Mrs. Potts, and Zoso.

She didn’t like having her spinner there but Zoso insisted the dagger had to be present. Rumpel wouldn’t let her take the risk of carrying it and neither of them trusted Zoso enough to just leave it lying around though Belle might have preferred even that to allowing her spinner to step into the thrice marked circled, made with white stone powder, sea salt, and water blessed by the clerics of Avonlea.

The look she shot to him was as nervous as the one Mrs. Potts turned on Zoso, in his robe and his low hood, a creature of darkness in his element, marking out magic runes on the forest floor in the middle of the night.

They’d only come to do it by night because that, like the distance, made it seem less likely that anyone else would come upon them as they tried Belle’s unlikely plan, but it did also add a sinister air to the proceedings: a sense of something forbidden and foul, a deed too dark to risk by the light of the day.

She shook her head at her own musings and consulted her book, checking over Zoso’s work, making sure there were no tricks. She knew nothing of magic but she could compare the shapes and marks he made to the diagrams in the book. Make sure no line of the circle of protection was out of place and all was done in the prescribed order.

Zoso leaned back on his haunches to survey his work and she moved to stand behind him to see it from his angle. Mrs. Potts waited at a small distance. She’d washed and brushed her silver hair until it shined, though she’d pulled it up and tucked it under her little white cap like she always did. She’d changed into a lovely green dress, though one that had seen better days, before she’d left and though it was wrinkled from riding with Belle on the horse that had brought them, it still made her seem softer and perhaps, younger. Or maybe that was just her nervousness and hope.

“I think we’re ready,” Zoso said quietly, and though his voice was rough it was impossible for him to entirely hide the nervousness and hope in him as well. She looked to Rumpel and he met her eyes calmly and nodded.

Without thinking she reached out and patted Zoso’s shoulder, as though he were a vassal or a friend and not a powerful magical creature, enslaved to do the will of the dagger her spinner held. A powerful magical creature she didn’t even like.

He didn’t acknowledge her, just stood from his crouch and slowly turned to face Mrs. Potts.

Mrs. Potts smiled nervously for him.

Belle took her sword out, feeling better with it in her hand, not sure what would happen if anything did. She cast a glance at her spinner, safe, she hoped, in the circle, the dagger drawn as well, though not for protection. Then she turned back to the other couple.

Zoso took a few stiff steps towards the housekeeper but when it seemed he couldn’t make himself go farther he held out one hand, slowly uncurling his fingers. It would have taken a very brave woman to look into that strange, scaled face and reach out for that clawed hand but fortunately Mrs. Potts was nothing if not brave and she closed the distance and took his hand with a tremulous smile.

He seemed to sigh in relief at her touch, drawing her slowly closer and laying his other hand lightly on her waist.

She didn’t hesitate at all to reach for his shoulder and then draw her hand up, along his neck, to cup his cheek. His eyes fluttered shut and his expression was one of pain and grieving, but he kissed her palm like a supplicant.

“I love you,” the housekeeper whispered, and it was so intimate a moment that Belle wanted to look away but she didn’t dare. If something went wrong she needed to know and be able to react quickly. If all went well they would have other moments to themselves. If it didn’t…at least they would have had this. It was more than some people ever had.

“I know,” he said hoarsely, words of love still beyond him in this form.

And then he lowered his head to hers and kissed her.

It was embarrassing to stand and watch it, and nothing seemed to happen, making Belle’s heart sink. Yes, at least they would have this, she thought to herself, her heart already aching for her housekeeper, and, to her surprise, even for the Dark One.

But after a moment they pulled apart and the housekeeper looked up and gasped. Zoso blinked slowly and suddenly Belle could see a shifting of his skin tone, smooth flesh showing through scales, mortal blue eyes where the glowing reptilian blue had been before the kiss.

Mrs. Potts beamed, looking decades younger than her years, and drew him closer. “Kiss me again, it’s working!”

Before he could answer she’d already pressed herself up into another kiss, catching her hand in his lank hair, arching against him like a vine to its trellis. His arms wrapped around her and after a moment, when they pulled apart again they were both laughing, giddy with the magic between them, the curse-shattering power of true love’s kiss.

“It’s working!” they both murmured together, still laughing, crying, clinging to each other. He looked even closer to human now, older, or he wore his age in a more recognizable manner though his hair was still black but his eyes looked mortal and his skin was almost entirely like human flesh.

They kissed again.

Belle risked a glance at Rumpel, standing in the circle. He too was wide-eyed but he was looking at the dagger he held before him, not the couple. She could see that Zoso’s name was disappearing from the blade. Only the Z and a part of one O remained and the O was almost gone.

A moment passed and even the Z began to fade.

By the time the housekeeper and the former Dark One stood, foreheads pressed together, breathless and still laughing like children, the blade was entirely blank.

“I love you,” Zoso whispered to Mrs. Potts and she sobbed, unable to do more than nod and press her face against his neck.

Still a little nervous for her spinner Belle tried to blink away her tears as she grinned at him. “It worked,” she whispered and he met her eyes and nodded.

She turned to him fully, holding out her hand.

“My guard will have arrived at the meeting place by now, waiting with the horses to take you and Mrs. Potts and…Zoso…safely back to the castle. Here, let me have the dagger so I can finish this.”

To her surprise he pulled it away from her.

“Rumpel?”

He was looking at the blade not at her. She frowned. “Rumpelstiltskin, give me the dagger.”

Slowly, eyes on the dagger, he shook his head.

“Give it to me,” she said sharply, drawing the attention of the others.

Zoso gave the spinner a considering look.

“Rumpelstiltskin!” she said again, growing concerned at his continuing lack of response.

“I told you two the curse would try to protect itself, even in the dagger,” Zoso said, his voice as annoyingly snide as it always had been, now that he wasn’t addressing his beloved. “It knows it was supposed to have fallen on your precious spinner.”

“Well tell me what to do to keep him safe from it!”

He shrugged, his arms still wrapped around Mrs. Potts, who was watching with concern but not willing to let go of her love, now that she truly had him. “Take it from him. And I’d do it quickly, before he tries anything foolish.”

“Anything foolish?”

Her gaze shot back to Rumpel. His eyes were clouded and he was staring at the dagger in vague contemplation.

What? Was she supposed to use her sword on him?

She took a step towards him, stepping into the circle and he took a step back. She froze, afraid she’d chase him from the circle with the dagger and terrified of what it might do to him if it was free of even the little rein the protection circle was exerting.

“Rumpel, love—hand me the dagger?” she pleaded.

He stood braced to move away from her. Two paces would take him beyond the line of runes.

Planting her feet firmly she reached out towards the fine cane she’d had made for him. He still treasured his old staff but the cane was less unwieldy and far more elegant. She rested her hand over his on the golden handle.

A tremor shook him and he blinked as though waking from a dream. He frowned at her. “Belle?” he said.

She smiled, relief and pleasure combined. She held out her other hand and gestured with it. “The dagger, Rumpel? Please?”

He nodded though it took him a long moment he finally held the dagger out to her. She waited until he was ready to let it go, holding his hand on the handle of his cane, still afraid to push too hard and trigger some trick of the blade.

She didn’t really breathe until he’d released the handle and staggered a step away. She relaxed and quickly sheathed the dagger at her waist lest it tempt her spinner again. She squeezed his hand on the cane. “Go with them, meet with my soldiers and go home, love,” she said.

His eyes widened at the new endearment, now that he could hear it, and he shook his head. “Belle—you shouldn’t go alone—”

She laughed. “I haven’t been duchess so long that I can’t handle a short jaunt to the sea. I’ll be back home before dawn. Go. Trust me.”

She stayed in the circle until they were gone, her spinner safely beyond the call of the dagger. Alone she held her breath to take her first step but she felt nothing strange, no pull, no whispers as she’d heard once before, the blade was quiet in its sheath and so she went to the place where she’d tied up her own mount and quickly headed towards her appointment by the sea.

 

* * *

 

The tide was out, the water calm, black, and serene beneath the starry sky.

Belle waded a ways into the waves and pulled out a shell on a leather cord, holding it up and blowing until it trumpeted, a single long, low note like the bellowing of a distant beast.

She waited.

Soon a dark form raised out of the water, just a bit, a low silhouette out a safe distance at sea.

She waved and the form disappeared. Then it was right before her, a head with long red hair, black in the water and darkness, big blue-green eyes sparkling like jewels from the bottom of the ocean.

“Belle!” the mermaid said happily.

“Ariel, thank you again for this.”

The mermaid raised herself a bit more out of the water, her torso and arms almost completely above the surface, her tail completely hidden under the waves. “I told you, it’s no trouble for me. Just a little swim is all.”

Even so Belle hesitated, not because she wanted to keep the dagger or its power for herself but because she feared passing the burden off to another. Still, she didn’t know of any other way to make sure the evil of the dagger was permanently nullified. Ariel could swim with it beneath the sea to a realm without magic where its power was useless.

“Be careful,” she said, pulling the sheathed blade from her belt and holding it out.

The mermaid took the sheathed dagger and looked down at it curiously.

“I mean it, Ariel. It’s dangerous. Don’t take it out of its sheath and don’t—”

“I know, I know. Don’t play with it, don’t keep it, don’t even look at it, just take it to the realm without magic and leave it there. I remember what you said.” She rolled her eyes and strapped the dagger around her own slim waist.

Belle laughed at her friend’s annoyed tone and held out her hand for a firm grasp. “Yeah, all of that. Truly, thank you. You’re doing our whole realm a service.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. So everyone owes me favor. I wonder when I can start collecting?” the mermaid said with a wink, sinking back down into the water.

“Whenever you like, as far as I’m concerned,” Belle promised with a smile. “I’ll do my part at least.”

She laughed, almost back below the waves. “We’re friends, silly, you don’t owe me anything. See you soon!” And then she was gone, a flick of her tail, a brush of fins below the water, and Belle stood alone again in the swirling tide.

“No, I think I owe you for this one,” Belle said to herself, remembering her spinner’s spellbound expression as he’d stared at the nameless dagger. With a small shudder she turned and waded back to shore, glad to be heading home to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: Gaston. After that: a pair of pirates (yep, Milah and Hook face off with Belle and Rumpel).


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gaston! 
> 
> ...is a stubborn punk that I couldn't get rid of in one chapter and I ended up having to introduce another character to get him where I wanted him so...
> 
> Part One of Gaston!

There was really only one thing that still troubled the new duchess.

—and he chuckled breathlessly as she pushed him back on the bench, sitting carefully astride his lap. “Belle—what are you doing?” he asked with a low chuckle, casting a dimly concerned look over the remains of their breakfast and around her hall, looking for servants or retainers who might be watching their mistress and ‘her’ spinner. At least Zoso finally had his own family to worry about and a job in the stables to distract him and keep his still disturbing gaze far from them.

She wiggled a little—until he gasped and wiggled as well—sighing and reaching for the buttons of his fancy waist coat. “I’m doing what wicked nobles have been doing to comely peasants since…” she paused and looked up, cocked her head, and then shrugged, looking back at him and resuming her work with his buttons. “…since there have been wicked nobles and comely peasants, I suppose.” She grinned and flicked the end of his nose, making him wrinkle it in that way she found so charming. “I’m going to ruin you so you have _no choice_ but to marry me.”

She finished with his waist coat and started unlacing the soft satin shirt underneath, almost salivating as she revealed the tanned skin of his slim, strong chest. She leaned down and nipped his collar bone, soothing the spot with her tongue as he shivered under her.

He grunted at her next nipping bite and arched up into her mouth and roving hands, his own hands coming to rest on her back, his clever fingers slipping through the laces of her dress. “If the last few dozen times didn’t ‘ruin’ me, what makes you think this time will—” He broke off with a gasp as her mouth found one of his nipples and went to work with her tongue and sharp little teeth while the fingers of her left hand traced delicately downward.

She paused long enough to whisper against his skin. “I’ll just have to keep trying until it takes.”

 

* * *

 

A while later she lay against him on the bench, her head nestled under his, one hand still tangled in his hair, the other softly caressing the marks she’d left across his chest. He stroked her bare back above the dress that had been left a tangle around her waist, pushed down from above and up from below.

She tried not to let her hurt take over, that he would do this much with her—revel in the fire and passion and madness between them, and then in the calm and the quiet and peace after—but give her no promises, even after all they’d been through together. Her stroking hand fell still, curling into a loose fist.

He caught it and lifted their joined hands to his lips, pressing a soft kiss to the back of her fingers. “Belle—” he started, hesitantly.

She sighed and turned her head a little to kiss his neck, inhaling deeply to fill her head with the lovely scent of his skin, warm and damp from their recent exertions. “It’s alright Rumpel. You don’t owe me…anything.”

“Ah, Belle. It’s just…you deserve more than a poor spinner.”

She couldn’t lift her face to meet his gaze while he made his excuses again. “I’m certain you’re a fairly rich spinner, now. But it really is alright. You don’t have to explain.” She couldn’t keep the defeat out of her voice though.

“Only because you insist on paying me for work I'd gladly do for free. Sweetheart—”

And that she couldn’t bear. Not endearments, not now, with his seed cooling and sticky between her legs and his refusal to marry her still echoing in her ears. She pulled away, dragging her bodice up to cover herself, and trying to stand. But he caught her by her shoulders and held her.

She frowned, still refusing to meet his eyes and see…what? Pity? God, no. She still had her pride, even if she was in love with a man who would never love her back.

She cleared her throat. “I have to go clean up before someone sees.”

“I—Belle, love, you deserve more.” She flinched at the further endearment. She was stronger than this. She should be stronger than this. But how strong was anyone ever, really, in matters of the heart?

“I want _you_. Just you. I don’t care that you’re ‘only’ a spinner. You…center me. You calm my restlessness. You make me happy to be staying here, with my people and my land and _you_ , instead of out adventuring like I always dreamed of doing. You turn my thoughts to home and…family.”

“Milah had seemed happy with home and family for a while.”

And just that quickly he turned her hurt to fury. “I am not Milah,” she snapped, finally meeting his eyes. “Our relationship is not the same.”

“She wanted adventure too,” he said with something almost like anger as well. “And in the end I wasn’t enough for her. Even Bae wasn’t enough for her.”

She shoved at his chest and his hands fell from her shoulders. “And I. Am. Not. Her. I’m sorry your first marriage ended badly, but I’m not her. I’ve had adventures. I’ve seen the world. I’m ready to move on with my life. I’m not proposing to ‘give up’ anything to marry you.”

“Except your chance to marry a better man.”

She growled. “You’re a coward.”

He nodded, eyes fluttering shut in a strange combination of defeat and relief, slumping against the bench.

She growled again, louder, and shoved at him again until he looked at her. “No, you dolt, you’re a coward because you won’t even give me a chance. You’re so damned convinced you can never be loved that you won’t trust me when I say I love you. If I wasn’t so in love with you…I’d…” She sighed heavily.

But she felt a little relief as well. If it was just his fear and lack of self worth that was holding him back she didn’t have to give up. She could keep fighting for him.

She clambered off of him and swept out of the room. “This isn’t over,” she told him.

 

* * *

 

She couldn’t afford to stay angry at Rumpelstiltskin; he was too important to her efforts to rebuild and so she was in council with him and her builders later that same day, discussing work that needed to be done in one of her outlying villages when a servant came in announcing that she had a visitor, sent to her by the king himself.

She hadn’t heard much from her liege since one of his advisors had come to tour her lands and observe her efforts to rebuild. He’d also extended his majesty’s gratitude then that she’d successfully dealt with the ogres as all others before her had failed to do.

She’d lied about how she’d accomplished that, of course. A single use spell that she’d found in one of her books is what she’d claimed had done the trick. She sent the advisor home with a scrap of some of her spinner’s finest cloth, made special to cover her story, scrawled over in his own spidery and nearly illegible letters, and partially scorched to make it look ‘used up.’

She felt a flutter of fear that the king had found out her deceit somehow and had sent someone to demand a more believable answer—all the people of the Frontlands knew about the Dark One, though she didn’t think tales of him had ever reached the king’s ears—but she raised her head like the duchess she was and went to meet with the king’s messenger.

To her surprise it was an armored knight that awaited her in her great hall, a tall, straight man with dark hair and eyes and a cool expression. He bowed for her when she entered, her spinner a step behind, her guards standing at the door.

“Your grace,” he said, in a pleasantly—if slightly pompous—deep voice, a lock of his hair falling boyishly across his pale brow. “I am Sir Gaston, younger son of the Earl of Norland. Our gracious king has sent me with congratulations on all your great work in restoring your lands—and a gentle reminder that the Duchess of fair Avonlea cannot tarry in securing an heir for her line and her property. I am to present myself as his chosen candidate for your hand.”

He said it all stiffly, as though he’d repeated the missive again and again to himself in an effort to memorize it, until the words were stripped of all emotion. A cold, dry recital.

She heard Rumpelstiltskin catch his breath as he made sense of the strangely flat proposal.

Her heart pounded and her skin felt ablaze—with anger. She’d demanded to be made her father’s heir so she could decide on the time and mate of _her_ choice, not so yet another man could decide it for her. But one did not lightly turn away a ‘suggestion’ from the king.

 

* * *

 

She’d kept up a pleasant smile with an effort, and spoken through her teeth, for this noble fiancé of hers was a bit thick-headed. Stiff, stubborn, obnoxious, he made several comments about looking forward to seeing what she’d done so far in her efforts to rebuild with casual asides that made it clear he expected to relieve her of the ‘burden’ of all her efforts as soon as they were married.

He was vaguely scandalized and then…yes, pitying…when he found out she was in charge of her soldiers and guard herself, and it was only with a severe effort that she managed to keep from drawing her sword on him to show him her qualifications—perhaps carve a nice explanation of them across his belly and points lower.

He was obviously disappointed in the state of her castle; it was clean, and she’d mended and reinforced the outer walls but there were still many rooms and even one wing and tower that she’d simply sealed off rather than waste the time repairing when there was so much more immediate need of the builders elsewhere.

When he heard _that_ her giant of a fiancé patted his massive hand on her shoulder consolingly and she fought back the instinct to snap her teeth at it, afraid the oaf would think it was some sort of flirting.

He promised he would see to her comfort as well as her safety while she bit the inside of her cheek until the taste of her own blood tinged her too-wide smile.

 

* * *

 

“He seems…protective,” Rumpelstiltskin muttered, not meeting her eyes.

For once she was too agitated herself to notice his withdrawal. “He’s an oaf! No one decides my life but me, not even the king and certainly not some buffoon from the north come to take over _my_ lands and make me into some mincing lord's wife.”

She stalked across the study to the fireplace where her father’s old sword hung in its place of honor. She pulled it down and sliced it through the air a few times as she’d done when she’d been a little girl dreaming of adventure. She cast a critical look down the length of the blade.

With her experienced eye she could see now what she had not been able to see as a girl: the sword had seen hard use in her father’s own adventurous youth and the metal was shot as far as being a weapon, brittle from age and too many repairs through the years. It was an ornament now. A memory and reminder. She replaced it in its display, still fuming and determined she would not share its fate.

“If the king sent him—”

“I will not be dictated to!” She turned on her spinner, finding him standing with his hands clasped on his cane, poised as if to flee the room, but his clear gaze was on hers. “He is my king but I am not his slave.”

If she was honest with herself her fury was more for her spinner than the king or even her idiot fiancé. She’d been raised a noble. The idea of a loveless marriage for politics or profit was almost expected; for all that her parents had been lucky enough to find love in their marriage, it had started the same. All her girlish dreams and ambitions had been set on adventure, not romance, and in truth, she’d always imagined when she was ready to settle down she would find an equally practical alliance.

The king had been rather thoughtful in his choice for her, in fact. Sir Gaston had a handsome face and a broad, elegant build. He was wrong-headed in his priorities but he was interested in her lands and responsibilities. He spoke of rebuilding, not spending her gold on parties or impressing the peasants and neighbors.

In time he’d have had more reason to regret their union that she would, she was almost certain: she would come to rule him with an iron fist, clever where he was dull, quick where he was stiff and slow. Before the ogres came it would have sounded like the ideal marriage to her: to know she would always have the upper hand.

He wasn’t even of her station, an earl’s younger son who would be raised to the position of duke by his marriage to her; it would be insulting if it wasn’t just one more way in which a station-conscious man would always be her inferior. It was possible he'd actually earned his knighting but she did wonder if even that had been only a small sop offered by the monarch to the difference in their rank. In any case it was the perfect marriage to never truly challenge her right to rule herself and her lands.

Now though?

“But the king—”

Now she wanted fire and passion and quiet and peace and someone she would lay down her land and title and very pride before because she knew that to his last breath he would defend what he cared about, more clever and brave and incredible than anyone in the world but she and his son seemed to notice.

If only he would admit he wanted that too.

“Do you _want_ me to marry Gaston?” she shouted.

“No!” he shouted back and they both froze, wide-eyed, inches from each other.

If she hadn’t been so furious she’d have been too afraid of his answer to ask him that so bluntly.

For his part, he looked as startled by his forceful response as she was.

She softened, reaching for him, one hand settling on his shoulder, the other curling around his neck to tangle in his hair.

“Rumpel,” she said softly, raising her mouth to his.

“You have a fiancé,” he murmured, a moment before their lips met.

“Not for long,” she promised when they broke apart for a moment, only a moment and they were kissing again.

 

* * *

 

Her spinner had also become her tailor, once he'd realized it was a way he could repay some of what she did for him--as though his counsel wasn't worth more than gowns or gold to her--and at the very least her 'betrothal' warranted the commissioning of a new dress.

 

* * *

 

The first time her humble spinner had seen her in a dress had come as a shock to both of them.

He and Bae had helped her go through the castle, finding what was salvageable after the ogres were banished. He had steadfastly refused to let her go through her rooms or her parents’ rooms by herself, insisting that she wouldn’t face that alone while he was there. Her spinner had been quite firm in that.

They had found her closet and all its contents ruined by the ogres' ungentle search for food; the wardrobe in her room had been knocked into the corner, the rare wood and beautiful woodwork destroyed beyond repair, but the clothes inside had actually been well protected and, though in wrinkled disarray, had been otherwise pristine.

Her spinner had pulled the puffy golden dress out of the wreck of her wardrobe with hands so gentle you would have thought he held a holy relic—professional interest she was given to understand later, for until that time he’d never handled materials so rich and fine.

She’d only worn the dress twice, once at the ball on her eighteenth birthday, once to greet the king on one of his infrequent trips to the southernmost reaches of his kingdom. Both times she’d worn it grudgingly, convinced that wearing any dress was a sign of her caving to the expectations of the world that she become a demure, obedient, quiet little heiress.

It had taken her teacher and friend, Mulan, to make her understand that she could be a warrior _and_ woman, wear armor _and_ dresses as the mood or circumstance required. That no one’s expectations mattered but her own and those of her loved ones.

As she stood in the echoingly quiet rooms, picking through the wreckage of her family home she touched the soft skirt of the once-hated dress, seeing in it the reflection of the parts of her life that she'd lost.

She would never go to another fitting with her mother as she had done for the golden dress. She would never see her father’s eyes light up as she and her mother entered a room, arm-in-arm, in their finery, and made their teasing curtsies to him. She would never spend another drunken night, giggling over hairstyles and beauty secrets with Mulan.

She felt very alone and ashamed of her tears.

Bae had quietly disappeared and her spinner had set aside the lovely dress and held her while she cried.

 

* * *

 

But since he’d been with her when they found the dress, since he’d actually been the one to pull it so carefully from the ruin of the wardrobe, she hadn’t expected him to look so startled when she actually wore it for the first time.

The castle staff and guard had been settled, Mrs. Potts and her brood had taken firm control, and Belle had arranged a meeting with several important men, including the former headman of the village of Avonlea and three of the five headmen of the outlying villages as well, about returning and helping with the restoration of the land that had once been so generous to all of them.

She’d known all of the men she’d summoned since she’d been a child and they were all well aware of her peculiarities. Even so, she knew that men of power, or at least men who considered themselves to be men of power, tended to prefer things to be ‘normal’ and her armor and sword and forthright ways were not what they’d consider normal for their duchess.

She’d been raised to play the games of politics before she’d ever been trained to battle in more honest ways so she planned a formal dinner for them, a more traditional display of her own power and the riches she still had access to from her overflowing coffers. Mrs. Potts was cooking for three days to get ready, the maids and footmen scrubbed and polished every surface of every room her visitors would be given leave to enter or see, and on the night of the dinner Belle had Mrs. Potts’ eldest girl help her into her old dress and put up her hair.

The dress was woefully out of style and puffy and overdone in the way an eighteen year-old had secretly adored, but that made the twenty-nine year old feel like an over-frosted cake—too many tiers, too many ruffles, too much lace. She could hardly get through the doors, her skirts were so impractically broad.

But the bodice was fitted and jeweled; it lifted her bust and gave the illusion of endowments she wasn’t lucky enough to have been blessed with naturally and cinched at her waist before it flared out again, making her seem impossibly tiny and frail. It was arms and armor in its way as much as her sword and leathers were.

The men who’d been waiting in her receiving room all fell silent and stood as she entered, including her faithful spinner and it was his expression that had startled her the most. He’d gone pale and his mouth had fallen open, his eyes wide. She cocked her head at him over the shoulder of Avonlea’s old headman as he bowed low over her hand.

Her spinner seemed to catch hold of himself and he smiled—sickly, weakly, and she hadn’t been able to shake off her concern, though she hadn’t let it show as she sparkled and laughed and charmed, leading the men to dinner as though she lead lambs to slaughter.

 

* * *

 

When the meal was eaten and cleared, the wine drunk, dessert devoured and at last, the stuffed, tipsy men sent off back to their families with promises to return to their former stations and renewed vows of allegiance to her and her line it left only her spinner and herself in the grand parlor.

She exhaled deeply as the door shut behind her guests and she slumped back in her father’s old chair.

From her spinner there was not a peep.

She looked over at him. He was dressed in his best, which was considerably better these days than it had been not so long ago. The cane she’d had made was propped beside him against the chair. His overlong hair had fallen forward to cover his face. She hadn’t seen him hiding like that since they’d returned together to Avonlea and she’d come to rely on him so much to help her restore her lands.

“What’s wrong, Rumpel?” she asked softly, wondering if one of the men had said something cruel before she’d come down to meet them. He’d been odd all evening; she should never have sent him to meet them alone. He didn’t have the confidence yet to socialize comfortably with men who were more sure of their own self-worth. She’d wanted him to sit in with them and be her eyes and ears in the spheres of men, where they would not have welcomed her, but clearly she’d asked too much.

“I should go,” he said. Only that, quietly, in a strange tone of voice.

He wasn’t drunk, he wasn’t overfed; he’d hardly touched a morsel or drop at dinner, all Mrs. Potts’ efforts going to waste on his plate, though Belle knew the servants wouldn’t be shy to take care of that once those untouched plates reached the kitchen.

She didn’t want to send him off in this strange mood he was in. “If you’re so tired you can stay the night here. Bae’s practically grown and Mrs. Potts’ Jacques is there with him anyway. There’s no need for you to hurry back to town—”

“To—to the Frontlands. I should return to the Frontlands. I don’t belong in Avonlea—with—with—”

_With you_. The words hung unspoken between them but she felt them nonetheless as though each was a blade in her chest.

“Why are you saying this?” she asked, reeling.

He glanced up at her through his hair but he couldn’t hold her gaze, quickly looking down again.

“You’re a duchess.”

“You’ve known that practically since we met,” she said.

“But—” He looked at her again, then as quickly away.

“What?”

He waved at her. “I’ve never seen you look so much…like a _duchess_.”

She was furious. He couldn’t just leave because she put on one of her old dresses and held a political dinner of sorts. He was her advisor. He was her spinner!

“What are you doing?” he asked suddenly, his voice a startled squeak.

She continued tearing at the laces behind her, literally ripping them in her annoyance. “If my current dress is so offensive to you that you would literally rather flee my land than look at it then I’ll just remove it.”

“Belle…your grace—”

She’d gotten it loose enough to start peeling down the puffed sleeves and fitted bodice, standing to get better leverage to wiggle herself free of the ridiculous garment. “Don’t you dare ‘my grace’ me, here, when it’s just the two of us,” she told him, panting a little as she fought herself out of the petticoats until she stood in front of his chair in nothing but her underclothes, stockings, and little heeled slippers.

Now he truly couldn’t look at her, a deep red flush over his cheeks, his own breath coming in a satisfying pant as well, though he’d done nothing yet.

She glared at him. This wasn’t the last desperate hours before a battle but it felt like it. She touched his cheek and turned his face to hers. The sad confusion in his eyes softened her a little. She tried to remind herself that her spinner was a man who was more used to losing than to having things—even people who cared for him. Even people who loved—

She hadn't been ready to follow that thought through yet.

She went to her knees between his legs, still cupping his face. A wordless sigh escaped him as she rested her other hand high on his thigh.

She leaned up to kiss him and smiled against his mouth when his hands were suddenly warm on her back, pulling her closer.

“What—what are _we_ doing?” he asked after a while, when she was half astride him on the chair and his hands had made a mess of all the maid’s careful work with her hair.

“I’m not entirely sure?” she answered him honestly, before she nipped at his lower lip and let him begin to nuzzle his way down her neck.

It didn’t take them long to figure it out.

 

* * *

 

Later she ran her tongue up his neck and he shuddered and she smiled.

“That thing you did—with your…and then you...” She chuckled. “That was really quite scandalous for a simple spinner. You know you should probably marry me before word gets around that you’re into things like that. It’ll ruin your reputation as an upstanding merchant,” she told him, mumbling words she hadn’t thought to say.

He stiffened under her, and not in the way she found enjoyable. “What—what?”

She laughed a little, because she’d only been teasing. She was sure she’d only been teasing. She kept thinking she’d only been teasing until the second time she found herself proposing.

 

* * *

 

Aside from their altered relationship and the resulting series of proposals that her stubborn spinner continued to refuse, the other consequence of him seeing her in the golden dress was his timid offer, when she opened her coffers to him and casually gave him free rein with all the bolts of cloth and material and threads she had no use for, to make her a new wardrobe of dresses to replace what she’d lost.

She hadn’t thought much about it at the time; of course she needed more than just the giant gold dress that was already over a decade out of fashion and the two demure blue house dresses that had been in the wardrobe so it just made sense to let her spinner take care of it. Even if it turned out he really couldn’t manage more than turning coarse wool into thread she wouldn’t mind, if it made him happy to play with the fabrics she had stowed away. As long as she wasn’t in such reduced circumstances that she had to sell off her goods to pay for the building she saw no harm in it.

Then had come the fittings, and if his skill with a needle had been worse than a blind tom cat she still would have insisted he be her exclusive tailor and contentedly worn rags for the rest of her life. It was fortunate then that he actually had quite a good eye for color and extravagant detail, as well as a clever hand with his needle.

 

* * *

 

He sighed again and his hands fell to his side, careful of the needle and expensive golden thread. “Would you stop moving?” he said shortly.

“You poked me,” she complained.

“I did not. I wasn’t anywhere close to your skin.”

“Well, something poked me.” She craned her neck around to glare at him.

Her fiancé had everyone in the castle snapping at each other though her irritation was still mostly directed at her spinner. Gaston had only been there three days but if he stayed much longer she feared her people were going to start dismantling the castle and village around her just for an excuse to leave again.

_Nope, no ma’am, no rebuilding Avonlea, the fairies don’t want it done; they come every night and undo all the rebuilding that’s been done and a little more beside; don’t know why everyone is so tired all the time, that must be an ill omen too._

She faced forward again and rubbed at her temple—which pulled the material pinned over her torso and the seam Rumpelstiltskin had been working on and made him jerk with a surprising lack of gentleness at the costly cloth where it met over her hip.

“Stop moving!” he said again.

“You know if you had just accepted when I proposed to you—”

“Don’t start that again.”

“—then I could have run off this Sir Gaston when he showed up and everyone would be in a better mood.”

“He doesn’t deserve you,” her spinner said fiercely, with another tug at the waist of the new golden dress.

“Of course he doesn’t. He’s not my spinner, who met me in my lowest hour and helped me steal the dagger of the Dark One from the evil duke. He’s not the one who’s stood by my side for every step as I’ve worked to restore my lands. He’s not—”

“Please don’t,” he said and the words were so soft and defeated that it stopped her.

Her head fell. This was not what she’d had planned when she’d arranged with him to start working on the new golden dress he’d promised to make to replace the outdated older one.

Usually when his hands were gliding over her body, pinning and stitching and taking measurements he’d taken so many times that even she knew them by heart now, things took a happier route. Oh he’d always do a bit of work, her industrious spinner, but usually by now they’d have moved on to more pleasant pursuits.

It was truly an indication of the tone of the day that all he’d done all afternoon had been work on the dress.

They couldn’t go on like this.

“Rumpel—” she started softly.

“Your grace!” her fiancé bellowed through the closed door of her study. “Lady Belle, we must talk. There is a boy training with your guard who is an absolute disgrace. He has no respect for his betters—”

The door flung open with no more warning than that and there Sir Gaston stood, obviously just having come from training. A light helm was tucked under his arm and his armor was muddy. His chest heaved and sweat streaked across his reddened face.

He froze when he saw her, standing on a stool, her spinner behind her, hand at her hip.

For a moment she was glad they hadn’t been up to anything more than the creation of another of his masterpieces, then she wondered unkindly if perhaps that would have been enough of a clue to send the fool off.

But then she registered the stern man’s expression: startled, longing-- _sorrowful_.

Her heart clenched.

She wasn't sure she'd ever seen a look of such naked, desperate _want_ in her entire life. 

He almost seemed to deflate, suddenly human and humble for the first time since she’d met him. He looked away and instantly went to close to the door again.

“Forgive me,” he mumbled, his deep voice soft and mild, tamed by some burdensome emotion she didn’t want to name. “I—I shouldn’t have entered without knocking.”

In the last instant before the door closed completely and blocked him from view she saw him look up again, that quiet longing still in his wide, dark eyes.

She bit her lip and lightly touched the skirt of her new dress where it flared gently from the base of the stiff, embroidered bodice. She didn't know if Rumpel had seen it too and she was afraid to ask. 

For a few minutes more the spinner worked, both of them silent. He didn't have to ask her again to be still.

—until, a bit later, there came a knock.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who could be at the door? What do they want? Will lowly spinner!Rumpel manage to turn the mighty Gaston into a lovely red rose? Only one way to find out! ...erm...and that way is to wait until I post the next chapter and then read it! ...sorry?


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gaston Part 2

Belle stiffened, not ready to face her fiancé again and possibly see that look in his eyes.

Fortunately it was her butler’s voice that called diffidently through the wood, wise enough about his mistress and her spinner to not enter unannounced.

“Pardon me, your grace, but you have another visitor. An envoy from King Stefan—strangely dressed fellow. I put him in the Purple Parlor.”

“King Stefan?” His kingdom didn’t even adjoin her own, and although Avonlea had been well known for its trade not long before, the ogres had put a halt to all that for a while. She couldn’t imagine what an envoy of a distant king would want with her.

She looked down at her skirts and smoothed them again. “No dress. Definitely leathers,” she muttered to herself.

“Help me, quick,” she said to her spinner and then called through the door for Cogsworth, “I’ll be right there. Offer him refreshments, tea, cakes, that sort of thing—and tell him he’s welcome to my home.”

 

* * *

 

It took almost a half hour to get free of the incomplete dress and another ten minutes to get into her leathers and make herself presentable enough to meet a foreign dignitary. Rumpel tried to disappear but she kept him with her, trusting his reading of people even more than her own and wanting him at her back as she faced this new unknown.

He was a step behind and on her right side as they entered the purple parlor. The foreigner, a small man, all in armor, was standing with his back to them, staring out a window at a walled-in garden lush with purple and blue blossoms of countless varieties, but he turned as they came in.

For a moment Belle stood, puzzled, for the foreigner didn’t wear armor in the style of King Stefan’s land—which was not very different from her own—but the armor of a land far distant. Familiar armor in fact, that covered a small frame that stood with a familiar ease in her home.

The foreigner outstretched her arms for an embrace and Belle flew into them.

“Mulan!” she cried, through startled tears and hopeful whooping as the arms closed around her.

“Belle!” the muffled voice replied.

 

* * *

 

Her friend and mentor had turned down Cogsworth’s tea, never having managed to acquire a taste for it even in all her time in the employ of Belle’s father. Instead she’d asked for boiling water and prepared her own tea, pouring it out graciously for Belle and Rumpelstiltskin as well.

Rumpel clearly liked it no better than Mulan liked the tea of their land though he did his best to hide it, looking rather dazed at the chatter going on around him as the two women tried to get caught up on all that had happened since they’d parted. He finally made his excuses and Belle hardly noticed, so delighted to have her friend back from the dead.

In the battle at Melford, a village to the south, not far from the town of Rivenport, Mulan had been reported as having fallen during one of the first incursions of the ogres against Belle’s lands.

In fact, Mulan explained, she had been knocked unconscious and taken by the river out to sea. It was a miracle she hadn’t drowned and she certainly would have once she reached the ocean, but a passing ship from King’s Stephan’s kingdom had happened by and a sharp-eyed sailor had seen her bobbing among the waves. She’d been brought aboard and once they’d realized she was a woman in armor, not the young man they’d taken her for, she’d been given to the only other woman on board, the king’s daughter, Princess Aurora, for tending.

It was a week in the princess’ care before she’d woken, but even then her wounds and fever had taken a toll: she was weak, groggy, and incoherent. By the time they reached the princess’ home, the family seat of King Stephan himself, Mulan had only just recovered enough to ask about Avonlea and the duke and his family.

No one in Stephan’s land knew anything about Avonlea, other than its reputation as a rich province, flush with trade; they hadn’t even heard yet that it had been set upon by ogres, and the princess was too worried about her charge to be willing to risk her recovery on news of a far-off war she could do nothing to aid.

The news finally reached her all at once about the fall of the town of Avonlea, the death of the duke and his family, then the return somehow of his daughter, victorious in battles that no one quite understood, except that the ogres had been banished and her lands opened to her again.

Mulan had wanted to send word of her survival but there was so much distance between them by then that she thought she would arrive as soon as a missive from her would and she wanted to make sure her former student was safe and well, to see the new duchess with her own eyes and hold her friend in her own arms before she was willing to trust that they both had somehow survived.

Belle listened raptly to the tale but when it was done she had questions. She knew her friend well…

“And this princess? Aurora? Tell me more of her,” she said with a sly expression.

Mulan stiffened, straightening, and for a moment she could have been a graven warrior, struck in iron. “She is…very beautiful.”

Belle nodded knowingly. “I bet she is.”

For a moment longer the other woman remained stiff, formal, then she huffed an annoyed sound and shoved at Belle’s arm, knocking it off her knee. “Shut up!” she said, breaking into a grin of her own and the two women laughed together.

“A princess, hmmm? You do aim high,” Belle said as they caught their breath.

“Well the duke’s daughter had no interest…”

Belle made a rude sound. “Please, as though you ever saw me as anything but an annoying little sister.”

“I might have—if you were not so damned annoying,” Mulan said with a smirk.

Belle cocked her head, sobering. “This feels different though. _She’s_ different, isn’t she?”

Mulan grew more serious as well, her smile gentling, her gaze growing distant. She nodded slowly. “Yes. It is…different.”

A little of Belle’s happy mood faded as she realized. “You’re not staying, then. You’ll go back to her.  In Stephan’s land.”

Mulan squared her shoulders. “I am contracted to your father—now to you—for—”

“Don’t be silly,” Belle said, grabbing the warrior’s hands and squeezing them. “You must know I’d release you from your contract. As though I’d ever try to keep you from someone who puts that sappy look on your face.”

Mulan pulled a hand free to lightly cuff Belle’s ear. “Mind your manners, welp. Duchess or no, this sappy old warrior can still take you.”

Belle shoved at her arm, pleased to find that she didn’t move her mentor an inch. “You think so? While you’ve been recovering, I’ve been training, practicing, and learning. I bet I can teach you a thing or two, these days.”

“Is that so?” Mulan demanded, standing and drawing her sword. She stalked around the room, dark eyes already checking the lay of the land for their impromptu battle.

“It is!” Belle assured her, standing and drawing her sword as well, almost bouncing with happiness to be sparring with her friend again.

 

* * *

 

In spite of defeating Belle—barely—the other woman was clearly exhausted by her journey and Belle was worried that she might still not be as recovered as she claimed, and so Belle saw her friend to the best guest room that was in a state for visitors.

They agreed that the next day they would take a tour of the surrounding lands and the reconstruction and Belle would fill Mulan in on all that had happened since the ogre wars had come to their doorstep.

And afterwards they would dress in their finest and do each other’s hair and make a night of it, as they used to. There was only a half finished tavern in town—a necessity, her spinner had assured her, since builders and laborers would need some place to relax safely and with rules or they would find places and ways to ‘relax’ that were neither safe nor lawful. But that meant the best Belle could offer was a night in, with her spinner and his son, and, unfortunately, her fiancé.

 

* * *

 

The next afternoon as they readied themselves for dinner Belle modeled the dresses her spinner had made for her, thrilled, though she tried not to show it, with how they impressed Mulan.

“Mèimei, your new man is talented,” the warrior said at last, admiring the beading on a skirt while she lounged in her underclothes, nursing a glass of wine and waiting her turn to show off.

Belle chuckled a little. “He’s not really _my_ —”

Mulan made a rude noise. “Please. I only hope the sappy look you say I wear when I speak of Aurora is at least a fraction less sappy than your look when your spinner is about, or I do not know how anyone has not tried to slap it off of me yet.”

Belle opened her mouth to defend herself but then shrugged, stealing Mulan’s glass from her hand and taking a sip before passing it back. She wouldn’t drink too much until Rumpel had headed home; she knew watching her drink brought back bad memories of his first wife. “Well fine then, as far as I’m concerned he’s mine. He’s really the one who has doubts.”

Mulan sputtered through her sip of wine and made the sound again, after she finished wiping the spilled drops from her chin. She had no reason not to imbibe. “You jest? The poor man is so besotted I can practically see the little hearts and flowers popping into being around his head when you walk by.” She traced her fingers in the air, outlining a small heart.

Belle smiled a little, still not sure of him, but pleased that her mentor saw something there.

Mulan tossed a pillow at her head. “There! That is it! That is the look!”

Belle caught the makeshift missile and tossed it back, leaning towards the warrior. “Tell me,” she said silkily. “Just what trinket of Aurora’s is it in that locket you keep peeking at whenever you think I’m not looking?”

Mulan blushed, actually blushed, and Belle burst into laughter, leaving her open for another pillow to the face.

She was still laughing though as she sat down on the couch beside the warrior, nudging her friend’s hip with her own. “It’s your turn anyway. Keep your secrets but go show me one of these new dresses your princess had made for you.”

 

* * *

 

Dinner was…odd.

Her spinner was, as usual when it was more than simply she and Bae with him, very quiet.

Gaston was, as usual as far as Belle could tell, disinterested in any sound but his own voice, hardly speaking more than Rumpel and making eye contact with no one but Bae—who he glared at whenever he caught the boy’s eye, the two of them apparently having had trouble at the garrison.

Bae split his time between mooning glances at Mulan, excited questions about her adventures, and his own frequent death-glares back at Gaston.

For the most part, Belle and Mulan carried the conversation and by the second course Belle was already regretting having invited Rumpel and Gaston to dinner at all.

It was Bae, with all his brash, youthful lack of diplomacy, who commented on how unusual it was to see Belle in a dress and how surprised he was to see Mulan, great warrior that she was, in one as well.

“And who is going to tell me I cannot wear a dress?” Mulan said softly, with a somewhat dangerous edge to her smile—it was not the first time a young man who’d seen her first as a warrior was surprised to see her as comfortably dressed in more ‘traditional’ attire. “Or armor when I have a mind to? Or anything else that it pleases me to wear?”

“It’s unseemly for women to wear armor,” Gaston cut in stiffly in his ringing, pompous tone. “As unnatural as a man in a dress.”

Belle would have been more irritated but she still felt guilty about her situation with him and it made her moderately more tolerant of his idiotic pontificating.

The warrior arched a brow. “Oh? Well I think that the only thing nature truly requires of us is that we one day _die_ —” her facsimile of a smile promised she’d have no trouble helping him with this natural obligation, and she speared a piece of venison on her fork for emphasis. “What happens before then is our own responsibility to decide. And if we are weak-willed enough to let others dictate our decisions that is no fault of ‘nature’ but of ourselves.”

Both Gaston and Bae looked down at their plates, surprisingly chastened.

Belle rolled her eyes.

It was a relief to send all the men off to their respective quarters and retire to her study with Mulan and a bottle of wine.

 

* * *

 

Several hours later, after stories of their previous adventures, stories of their recent ones, the acting out of old battles and a mostly-mocking wrestling match—as well as most of the bottle of wine—the two woman sat curled together on the carpet in front of the couch. Belle leaning back against it, Mulan sprawled beside her, head in her former-student’s lap while Belle absently stroked her hair and Mulan pondered the next verse on a drunken ode to Aurora’s musical laughter.

“I’m glad you found her. I’m glad you’re happy,” she confided, feeling uncommonly melancholy herself.

Mulan would go back to her beloved princess soon, leaving Belle to sort out the spinner who didn’t trust her love and the fiancé who acted like a buffoon but had looked at her as though she were the very embodiment of all his dearest dreams. Her head fell back. God, the wine was making her maudlin; she should stick to ale.

Or maybe she could just kidnap Bae and take off on an adventure. Rumpel wouldn’t like it but Bae was still young enough to be fairly good and undemanding company for a man.

“Things do seem to be pretty complicated around here at the moment,” Mulan said, looking up at her in sympathy.

“Complicated? That’s one word for it. Me, mooning over my spinner. My fiancé mooning over me—”

Mulan let out a crack of laughter that broke off abruptly at Belle’s hurt look. She sat up. “What are you talking about? Your fiancé ‘mooning’ after you? He hardly looks your way and when he does I am not certain he even sees you there.”

“You didn’t see him when he interrupted my fitting with Rumpel for a new dress.”

Mulan snorted. “‘Fitting,’ you say? You used to be more frank. I will never get used to the euphemisms here—”

That won a smile and a shoulder bump. “Rude. It was just a fitting…this time,” she said with a smirk.

Mulan laughed and nodded knowingly. “I thought so. Anyway, I do not know what you think you saw when your fiancé was lucky enough to not interrupt anything more than tailoring, but I promise you, the man has no romantic feelings for you.”

Belle cocked her head, considering. “Do you think…Rumpel then…?”

Mulan burst into laughter again. “Your spinner? You seriously think he could have designs on your spinner? Your beloved may as well be a curtain for all that Gaston notices him. I think if he _had_ caught you and your spinner together doing more than tailoring he would have thought he had caught you diddling yourself, for all the impression your spinner makes on him.” She frowned for a moment. “He is really very arrogant.”

 Belle’s mouth quirked again at the thought of Gaston walking in on her with an invisible paramour, unable to see his ‘rival’ down the long length of his own upturned nose, but she wasn’t comforted. Mulan was clever and observant but she hadn’t seen what Belle had seen the previous day.

Gaston had deep feelings for someone who had been in that room and it certainly seemed that it had been Belle his desperate eyes had been pinned on.

 

* * *

 

Oddly, the next day she couldn’t find either of the men in question but she was busy enough that she didn’t worry overmuch.

Belle never suffered for drinking, but Mulan was not so lucky, leaving Belle time to tend some of the more pressing concerns of her building projects and even work with Bae on his lessons for a bit.

Unaccountably, her young friend was so sour about his lessons that she began to rethink her drunken plan to kidnap him. It seemed she’d waited too long, he was as contrary and confusing as his elders: he’d become a man indeed.

“ _What_ is wrong?” she finally demanded, after perhaps the fifth time he’d rolled his eyes and surely after at least a dozen gusty sighs. 

He put his head down and mumbled something she didn’t bother to strain to hear. She wasn’t going to play such childish games.

“Baelfire. I’ve told you, I’m not talking just to hear myself speak; what I have to say, what these books have to teach, will help you make your way one day. They will lay the world at your feet and prepare you to face any number of challenges. You’ll be free, as so few are, to choose your own path—if I don’t wring your neck for rolling your eyes at me _one_ too many times!”

She growled the last and he at least had the grace to look slightly ashamed for a moment before that sullen pout took over again and had her rolling her own eyes back.

Just because it was a habit he’d picked up from her didn’t give him the right to use it against her.

“Where’s Mulan?” he finally said after the silence had stretched between them for a while and it was impossible for her to entirely hide her hurt. It was foolish to feel…replaced, but she’d thought they were closer than that. She knew she’d spoken of her mentor so much that the boy had been half in love with her for almost a year and a half, part hero worship, part crush, and she knew she would never be as exciting as a woman who’d disguised herself as a man to enter the army in a land even more restrictive of its women than their own, who’d fought and won against impossible odds and saved her kingdom, then returned only to set out again, this time to lands so far away she didn’t know the language and people so foreign she could never pass for a local.

But she hadn’t realized she meant so little to him. She tried to tell herself it was just that Mulan was new, and literally back from the dead as far as the boy was concerned, and that she hadn’t misread his affection as badly as she sometimes feared she’d misread his father’s—no matter what Mulan had claimed about him in the grip of the wine, her soggy brain full of poems of love for her far away princess.

“She’s still in bed, I’m afraid. It was a late night for us,” she said, looking away and rising as coolly as she could to let herself out. He could finish his reading or not, she wasn’t going to coddle him.

“Belle?” he said softly, when her hand was on the door knob and she hesitated, though she didn’t think she wanted to hear anything else from him that morning.

“Are you really going to marry Gaston?” he said, when she didn’t reply.

She turned back to him, startled out of her pique. “Of course not. Him? Can you imagine? Me, his ‘little wife?’” She pressed her hands together as though in prayer and leaned her cheek against them for a moment, trying for the look of properly demure young woman, batting her eyelashes up at her big, strong husband. Then she snorted. “Please.”

Bae sprawled back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest.

“Then why is he here? Talking about how the king sent him to be your husband and how everything will be different once _he’s_ running things?”

Suddenly she felt much better and she went back to the table to take her seat again, tapping his boot with the tip of hers to remind him to seat himself in a more gentlemanly manner, at least while he was in the house and not the garrison. She waited until he’d resettled himself before she spoke again.

“Is that why you’ve been such a pest all morning? You actually believe I’d hand my land—not to mention myself—over to that pompous windbag?” She really had been trying to think and speak more kindly of him, but this was not the time.

Bae cracked a smile, but his arms were still crossed. He started to roll his eyes until he seemed to remember her threat and stopped himself, grinning a little wider instead.

“I have not been a pest.”

She nodded solemnly. “I was just about to go ask the gardener if he has anything for pest removal that he could promise wouldn’t harm the upholstery or wood in here—”

“Belle,” he whined, the sweet, crooked grin that reminded her so much of his father firmly in place again.

She held her hands out helplessly. “Well, I mean, I have to think of the upholstery.”

He laughed. “Stop.”

She pursed her lips but then smiled at him. “I can’t believe you thought I’d actually marry that man. King’s command or no. There are ways around such things.”

He leaned forward, the eager young man she was so familiar with. “So you have a plan?”

She nodded firmly as though there was no doubt. “Of course,” she lied.

He looked relieved. And younger. Then he glanced down at his hands on the table. He bit his lip. “I’m sorry, Belle. I was just—Papa—I’ve thought—and then that man came…”

She waited, wanting to know exactly what his father had to do with his foul mood and his resentment of Gaston.

“Mama wasn’t…nice. I didn’t understand a lot of it at the time, but I remember and I know what it all means now. The nights at the tavern, the nights she never came home, or at least not until after sunup, her clothes and hair mussed, smelling of alcohol and sometimes...other things. He never said anything to me against her, ever. I don’t think he thought he deserved any better. It was enough that he had me.”

She wanted to reach for him but she knew he wouldn’t appreciate it. He had his pride and she didn’t want to stop his words. They were painful and clearly hard for him to say but she could tell he needed to say them nonetheless.

He looked up at her, suddenly pinning her with his dark gaze, so like his father. “But he won’t always have me. I want to go out and see the world. I want adventures, like yours; like Mulan’s. But I’m worried about him—what I’ll be leaving him to. I was starting to hope I’d be leaving him to you, though.” He looked at her, his heart in his eyes. She honestly had no idea how to respond.

“I’ll always care for your father, Bae. The two of you both mean a great deal to me and I owe your father a lot—”

His face darkened again.

“But do you love him?”

She choked. Really, the _son_ wanted to have this conversation with her? His father practically ran whenever she tried to pin down their relationship or convince him that she wanted more but his son wanted to sit down and discuss her intentions towards her spinner?

“I—” His stern look would allow for no prevarication. He was coming to her as an adult, speaking to her as an adult. Demanding to be treated as one, in turn. And suddenly she felt such a rush of affection for him.

He would never be her son; he was practically grown by the time they’d met, but he was brave and clever and forthright, determined and fiercely loyal. He was going to be the very best of men and it was her privilege to have had any part in helping him find his way. She nodded slowly. “I do love him. So much.”

He whooped and sprang up from his chair to throw his arms around her. He pounded her on the back, chattering excitedly, like the boy he no longer was. His blessing, his excitement, his confidence that she and his father were perfect for each other.

He was gone from the room like a whirlwind before she caught on that he’d left all his books spread out on the table. She had to chuckle, her hands over her face. God help the one that boy fell in love with, they would never know what hit them.

A moment later Mulan stumbled in, pale, quiet, and flinching at every creak of the wooden floors beneath her own feet. She collapsed in the chair that Bae had just vacated. “Tea,” she mumbled. Only that.

Belle shook her head and reached for the bell pull to summon Cogsworth.

 

* * *

 

Dinner that night was a less boisterous affair, but equally dependent on Bae and the women for the night’s conversation. Gaston in particular seemed lost in thought and Belle tried not to let that worry her too much.

After dinner even Belle and Mulan retired early.

 

* * *

 

The women started the next day early in the garrison, Mulan putting all of the soldiers through their paces as she had done when she’d been contracted to Belle’s father.

Belle could tell that the warrior still hadn’t completely recovered her stamina from before her injuries but she doubted anyone else could. The soldiers who’d returned to their posts greeted Mulan with cheers and hugs—and then groans when they found out she wanted to spar. The soldiers who were new since the coming of the ogres didn’t know enough to worry but they soon learned.

Except for Bae, who took the place opposite her in the training ring, looking both eager and terrified. Belle worried he was going to injure himself, he was so obviously star-struck to be facing his idol.

Mulan made short work of him and Belle winced to see him perform like the green boy he’d been when she met him. She knew it was just nervousness but a soldier couldn’t afford to be so vulnerable to his emotions and he’d be heartbroken at his poor showing. But to her surprise instead of slinking off to sulk or hide he got back into the line waiting their turn to fight Mulan and when everyone else had gone he took his place against her again. Mulan made no sign that she’d noticed that he’d come back but Belle knew her friend better than that.

Unfortunately he fared little better the second time and Belle could see the defeat in the rounding of his shoulders and the falling of his head. He hadn’t wanted to win, he’d just wanted to do better.

Without thinking about it Belle grabbed a practice sword and took to the ring, nudging her friend away. “En guarde,” she grunted at the young man, who hadn’t even noticed that his usual teacher had taken the place of his idol.

He looked up, startled, but he took his position by habit when she immediately pressed her attack. She didn’t go easy, pressing him for all she was worth and he didn’t last long against her either, with only a year and a half of training since the first time he’d ever even held a real sword. But he did last longer and work harder and show himself better.

“We’ll have to start training you harder against a larger variety of partners,” she said, inwardly wincing. Her spinner would not be pleased, he worried so.

Bae grinned and nodded. He turned a sideways glance towards Mulan and his grin faded a little but Belle was glad to see the sparkle not completely gone from his eye. He was still nervous of what Mulan thought, but he knew he’d done better and he was proud of himself.

She dismissed her soldiers and she and Mulan went back to the house to clean up.

 

* * *

 

“—he isn’t too bad for a green-sword.”

“He’s getting better. He likes those lessons more than the books. His father’s just the opposite though...he’d have me lock up all the weapons as though Bae were a child and never train him with anything more dangerous than the ladder in the library.”

Mulan snorted. “He hasn’t been around you long enough. I’ve seen you get yourself into far more trouble with your mouth and things you picked up in your books than you ever get into with your sword.”

They’d bathed and dressed and we’re just coming out of Belle’s quarters to find Jeannette, Mrs. Potts’ eldest daughter, the maid who occasionally doubled as Belle’s lady’s maid when she needed one, lingering in the hall, a worried expression on her face.

“Jeannette?” Belle said. The girl didn’t seem worried enough for it to be an emergency, looking more indecisive and confused than anxious.

“Lady Belle...” The girl said slowly, obviously still trying make up her mind whether she should speak up about whatever was troubling her.

Belle nodded once and smiled encouragingly.

The girl nibbled her lip but then nodded as well. “Lady Belle, we— _I_ wasn’t certain we should say anything...and Master Rumpelstiltskin did specifically ask us not to...but...we— _I_ thought you should know...”

Her spinner was keeping secrets?

“…it’s just…he’s been locked up in the purple parlor all morning with Sir Gaston. They were in there most of yesterday too. We— _I_ happened to be walking by a few times today and yesterday and we can’t hear anything that’s going on, it doesn’t even sound like they’re talking. We— _I_ —I mean, _the gardener_ , happened to be going by the window yesterday and noticed that the curtains were drawn all day as well.”

Belle wondered absently what bet Jeannette had lost to be offered up as messenger for this information but she didn’t stop to ask for any more, already going at a brisk pace towards the purple parlor. What was her oaf of a fiancé doing to her spinner?

Mulan kept up, both of them with their hands already on the pommels of their sheathed swords, ready.

 

* * *

 

She didn’t bother to knock—it was her castle after all—she just shoved the door open. “What is going on—”

She stopped.

It was like she was looking in a twisted sort of mirror, confusing time and image together.

Gaston stood in the center of the room in a dress of glowing scarlet, embroidered with elegant roses picked out in Rumpel’s favored golden thread, while her spinner stitched up a seam along the side of the bodice.

Rumpel’s hands fell away and he stared at her, wide-eyed.

Gaston looked panicked for a moment, before he schooled his expression back into its usual haughty glare. But he held his hands over the stomach of the dress he was wearing as though he was afraid she and Mulan would try to tear it off of him. With all the arrogance of a dowager queen—and the grace of a soldier goose-stepping in formation, he marched out of the room without a word.

Belle turned and watched him go.

“Oh dear,” she muttered.

Mulan had been right: his expression of longing when he’d interrupted her fitting hadn’t been for her or her spinner. It had been for her dress.

 

* * *

 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Belle demanded.

Rumpel shrugged, looking exceedingly uncomfortable. He’d released his needle when Gaston had walked off because its thread had been half-stitched into the dress already and his hands still twitched, itchy to be occupied. “He asked me not to.”

“And the two of you are now best, secret-keeping buddies?” she asked incredulously. “When did that happen?”

He shrugged again. “He—he said some very nice things about the dress I was making you.”

Belle couldn’t speak but Mulan clapped her on the shoulder and took over. “So you offered to make him one?”

“I wouldn’t have presumed.” His tone of voice said what he thought of the ‘presumption’ of such an offer to a man almost two heads taller than he was. “But after dinner the other night, I think because of your talk about it being no one’s fault but your own if you let someone else dictate your life under the guise of what’s ‘natural’—he asked. Apparently things are very particular up north and his father and brother are even more rigid than he is. He was hoping to get away from that little, by coming south. And when the king proposed that he...well, propose...it sounded like his chance.”

“As he’s been here— _this_ has been his idea of getting away from rigidity?” Mulan asked. “This time here has been him _letting loose?”_

While Belle appreciated Mulan’s shock that all the stiff, stuffy man’s irritating behavior had been a sign of him ‘relaxing’ she was still caught up on the baffling relationship between that arrogant boor and her gentle, humble spinner.

“And he confided all of this to you?” Belle asked.

“He talked a little. Mostly just compliments on my tailoring. But a little about where he’s from. And how much he’s always wanted dresses like the one I’m making him. If you don’t marry him, he’ll have to go back to his father and brother.”

She could tell how her kind-hearted—and flattered, who would have guessed Gaston had it him?—spinner felt about that. “Not necessarily,” she assured him.

 

* * *

 

“You owe me,” Mulan swore again, as she had done countless times by this point, while the two shared a last embrace at the border of Belle’s land.

“Jiějiě,” Belle wheedled, but then changed tack when she could see Mulan wasn’t going to be bought by sisterly affection. “It probably won’t be so bad,” she said, cheerfully lying through her teeth. “As soon as you get to Aurora’s palace you can send him off on other business and you never have to talk to him again.”

“Yes, but it will take almost a month to get there,” she pointed out.

Belle couldn’t keep from wincing. “Give him a chance, perhaps he’ll charm you? He managed to charm Rumpel.”

“I have no sewing skills to speak of, unless he needs field medicine or to mend a tear—and he can mend his own damn tears.”

Belle laughed. Mulan didn’t.

“I appreciate it very much?” she tried, but the words still didn’t soften her friend’s irritation as the two caught up with the men and the horses. Gaston’s mount carried a pack with not one but three of Rumpel’s finest works. Belle was a little jealous, of the time as well as the dresses, and they way the oaf had smirked as he’d showed them off before packing made it clear he’d noticed. She couldn’t be too resentful though, especially since he was finally leaving, and everyone involved was heart-whole.

“You will come to visit me,” the warrior said firmly, the words punctuated by a soft grunt as she seated herself on her mount. Belle decided to pretend that was forgiveness.

“Of course I will! When things have settled here, nothing will keep me from meeting this princess who turns the hardest warrior I’ve met into a lovestruck girl.”

Mulan didn’t bother to pretend gruffness this time and finally cracked a small smile. “I will hold you to that. Don’t make me return and have to drag you back with me.”

They clasped arms, already too far apart for another hug, before Mulan nodded to Gaston and urged her own mount forward.

Belle and Bae and a handful of other soldiers watched Mulan and Gaston ride away until their path turned and they disappeared into the trees.

 

* * *

 

It was the first time Belle had managed to coax her spinner into anything so prosaic as an actual bed.

It was lovely.

“That was very kind of you,” he said, his voice a distant rumble behind the slow thrum of her heartbeat.

“Uhm?” she mumbled, pressing her face against his throat, seeking out another intoxicating taste of his skin. Making him shudder as she nibbled a particularly sensitive area that was usually hidden by his hair.

“Sending your fiancé off with Mulan,” he said, but his arms were closing around her again, one at the small of her back, pressing her to him, the other cradling the back of her skull and tangling in her hair as her work on his neck made him start to stiffen under her in a way she liked very much.

She chuckled, then gasped as he slid against her knowingly, earning her a chuckle in response.

“He was never really my fiancé,” she assured him between sharp little bites, starting to squirm under his roving hands. “I would never have married him.”

One of his hands slid between them, quickly arranged things, and then he was inside her again and she purred.

“He wasn’t so bad,” he said breathlessly, moving in a way that made it hard for her to keep up with the conversation.

“Maybe not to you—he actually struck up something with you—but do you really want to talk about him _now?_ ”

His answer was silent but clear.

 

* * *

 

About a week later the king received a letter from the Duchess of Avonlea.

It seemed that it was with a conflicted heart she had to inform him that the union between the duchess and the Earl of Norland’s younger son was not to be, as the duchess had been entertaining a dear friend and former retainer who was now in the employ of King Stephan as a personal guard for his only daughter and the woman had been so impressed with Sir Gaston’s prowess in battle that she’d offered him a place in the princess’ guard as well. It was too great of an honor, both to Gaston’s family and the kingdom, to turn down the opportunity.

Fortunately however, the Duchess assured him that she was already in negotiations to secure a new suitor from closer to home, and should her efforts prove successful, she and her spouse would present themselves at court for their majesty’s blessing very soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do hope I handled this as tastefully and respectfully as I intended? Gaston is not supposed to be a joke here, just a jerk who likes dresses. Belle and Mulan can like armor and fighting and still dig gussying themselves up in dresses and ribbons and such whenever they feel like it, so can he.
> 
> The Dark One's Curse has been broken by True Love's Kiss. Gaston has been turned into a rose (that was seriously the point of this whole two chapter spread: getting Gaston into Rumpel's red rose dress). Next up: Milah and Hook.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A pair of pirates come to town. I really can't call him Hook like I have been, he still has his hand so it's actually 'Killian Jones' and Milah.
> 
> *****Yes, I've just changed the title. This was called "Reconciled" but I've put enough work into it now I finally felt like I had to give it a better title. It was already the name of the series (this story + Averted, that I may go back a give a better title to at some point also).

It was Bae’s second time going out with one of the patrols that had been her own start in the life she’d chosen, claiming her own destiny, adventure, excitement, freedom.

From there, once her father and Mulan were pleased, she’d gone on to see the world. A brief stint at the front against the ogres before the Duke of the Frontlands had shut down all his neighbors’ efforts of help in favor of his own control over the situation.

Then it had been journeys by boat and by caravan and by horse, to the deserts of Agrabah, the frozen fjords across the northern oceans, the mountainous shores of Mulan’s homeland. City and village, forest and jungle, moor and marsh and rolling plain. She’d loved every minute of her travels and she saw so much of herself in Bae’s wild eagerness to explore, she knew when his time came he would travel as far or farther.

The first time he’d gone out she’d gone as well, partially for Rumpel’s comfort—but partly for her own. He was too clever for his own good, and better even with the less savory skills she’d shared with him than he was with his blade. Picking a lock, undoing a knot—especially one around your own wrists or ankles say—were necessary skills for a certain lifestyle. It worried her a little how proficient he’d proved.

His history lessons had trended towards benevolent thieves for a while as a result, pointed reminders than even theft could be turned to the people’s good by a true-hearted man. She hoped he’d gotten the message.

She’d seen clearly when Mulan had been with them that he needed more time away from her though, more time with new challenges and different situations and people if he was going to grow in the ways he needed to, so this time she was staying behind while he left on a week long patrol. He’d been over the moon with excitement.

His father had been sick with worry.

To her surprise, so was she. Somehow her nervousness had comforted her spinner, though whether it was because he could see she was taking it all seriously or because it gave him the chance to be the comforter regarding Baelfire’s abilities and courage for once, she didn’t know. She just knew it was strange and unpleasant to find herself being the one wringing her hands and staring off distracted as they dined in his house the night after Bae had left.

Her spinner wasn’t comfortable having others in his house, so while he had a girl to clean and cook he’d dismissed her when the food was done and he served Belle himself, pouring out another cup of tea after she’d helped him clear the table of their meal.

She raised the cup of steaming tea to her mouth and then a memory flashed in her treacherous mind of one her own first border patrols.

They’d come upon a single errant ogre who’d somehow managed to get away from the front and stumble across their borders. It had taken every woman in that specially-arranged-by-Belle’s-father patrol to take the beast down. Ogres were no small challenge; she’d seen a single one of the beasts lay waste to troops of well trained men at the front. They’d been so much closer since then too. If one…just _one_ had escaped the Dark One’s spell—

She gulped the tea as if it were an ale—it was the wrong sort of burn—and went to set it on the table with entirely too much force, but she was distracted by her grim musings and the cup bounced off the edge of the table and out of her hand, tumbling to the ground with an unfortunate clatter.

She grumbled at herself, ducking under the table to retrieve it, but came back up nibbling her lip and holding the cup out for Rumpel sheepishly.

“Uhm…I’m so sorry, Rumpel. It’s…it’s chipped,” she said, feeling awful. He’d never had nice things before and he appreciated what he had now so much. “You can hardly see it?” she lied, not able to look above the broken rim of the pretty little cup. She could buy him another tea set. She could give him one; she had nicer tea sets just gathering dust in the castle.

“Belle—it’s just a cup,” he said, his voice layered with gentle humor. She managed a glance at him. He smiled his crooked smile and she relaxed a little. He held out a hand, and she took it, going to sit on his lap on his chair at the head of the table. She wrapped her arms around him and tucked her head under his chin and he wrapped his arms around her as well, after carefully setting the chipped cup back on the table.

“You really are nervous about Bae being out there without you, aren’t you?” he asked, rubbing his hands soothingly along her back.

“Aren’t you?”

“Well…he’s always out there without me, so this isn’t really so different.”

"Oh, fine. You choose _now_ to be reasonable about him."

He squeezed her. "I suppose one of us has to be. We can't both be panicking over him. There'd be no one left to keep a level head."

She twisted a little and gripped his shoulders, staring earnestly up into his face. "Has it really been this bad for you every time I've taken him out?"

He just looked at her for a moment, thinking back on his own reactions, gauging hers. Then he chuckled wryly and nodded.

She went back to her position, tucked up under his chin. "How do you stand it?"

He stroked her hair. “I remember that he’s got a very good teacher. And that you picked the others in his patrol personally to make sure he’d be as safe as possible. And I…” He audibly swallowed and she wasn’t surprised that his tone was more subdued when he continued. “And I remember that he’s growing up and the only way he’ll ever be happy is if he goes out there and finds his happiness.” His head fell back, no longer resting on her head. She missed the weight of it. “I know him well enough to know he won’t ever find what he wants safe at home with me. He has to go; I have to let him.”

Rumpel’s quiet words reminded her of her discussion with Bae when Mulan and Gaston had been with them. How he’d wanted to know that she was going to be there for his father when he was gone. She felt a chill but shook it off.

“I’m being selfish, aren’t I?” she asked.

“Hmm?”

“I mean, I’ve only known him two years. You’ve had him for sixteen and here I am acting like it’s as bad—”

“Hush,” he interrupted, stroking her hair again. “I know how close you two have gotten. I don’t mind.”

“He does grow on a person.”

“Like his father,” he joked but she laughed because it was true.

She helped him tidy up; he still wasn’t used to leaving such things for the servant he wasn’t entirely comfortable employing and she wouldn’t sit back and watch him clean as though she couldn’t be bothered.

They went to his bed that night, and he presented her with a new silk and lace nightgown-shift that would have been scandalous if she was a different sort of woman. They cuddled together in his big bed but her new nightgown and his usual one stayed in place. She liked the hominess of it all. It almost distracted her from her worry about Bae.

 

* * *

 

It wasn’t unusual for him to wake first, so she wasn’t surprised when she snuggled back into his arms and then twisted around for a kiss and could instantly tell from his expression he’d been awake for a while.

She kissed him sleepily, and he gave her a flicker of a smile but something was clearly on his mind.

She rolled over so she could watch his face, grinning, and unable to stop herself from nibbling at his stubbly jaw because he looked far too serious for it being so early on a day they could afford to laze about for a bit, and she twined her arms loosely around his neck. “Bad dreams, Rumpel?”

“Not…bad. Just odd.”

She pulled back a little, startled because she’d been teasing, assuming he was just worried about Bae. She reached up to stroke the little worry line between his brows. “What did you dream?”

He pulled a face, sticking his tongue out for a moment and she smiled and cocked her head, but waited for his answer nonetheless. “I just…it’s stupid.”

“Rumpel…”

“I was a knight,” he said in a rush, with a shy flashing smile. “With armor and a sword and a big white horse. It’s ridiculous, I know—”

She smiled and shushed him with two fingers laid gently against his lips. “It’s not silly at all. You’re already a hero. You’d make a great knight.”

He kissed her fingertips and rolled his eyes, catching her hand and pulling it away from his mouth. “It was completely ridiculous. As if I could travel the land fighting ogres and dragons. How would I vanquish them? Sew them all new clothes? Blankies? Do dragons fancy silk nightgowns, do you think? Lacey bloomers for the ogres?”

She stroked his cheek and leaned up to steal another kiss, breaking off his self-deprecating humor. “You would defeat them the same way you’ve helped me defeat all of my challenges of late—with that lovely quick mind of yours. There’s more to being a hero—and a knight—than poking at things with sharp swords. Though…” she licked her lips. “I’ve experienced your ‘sword work’ often enough by now to say that you know what you’re doing—”

It was his turn to silence her with a kiss. He broke it off with a sound between a chuckle and a growl. “Belle…”

After a moment he surprised her—and roused her from a doze—by continuing. “You…you were in the dream too,” he said so softly she got the impression he was half-hoping she wouldn’t hear, so she didn’t answer.

“You were my lady. My—we were…we were married.” He said the last so quietly she was straining to hear though he had to know she was awake and listening when she went stiff in his arms. “We had a child, still in the cradle. I don’t know if it was a boy or a girl. You stayed home with it while I traveled saving people and villages and I came home to find the two of you waiting for me. It was—we were happy.”

More than the idea of them being married in the dream, or even the baby—their baby!—that she’d love to hold in truth, the idea of her as a demure lady, waiting at home for her valiant knight had her throat tightening. “Is that what would make you happy? If I was the sort of woman to sit quietly at home—”

He squeezed her, pressing her face tight to his neck. “That’s not what I was saying. You’re perfect. You’re absolutely perfect exactly as you are.”

She kissed him again, shyly, not entirely believing him.

 

* * *

 

She was still thinking about it later. Of course she was. Wasn’t that what every man wanted? A proper lady? The sort who’d wear pretty dresses every day and do the housework and take care of the children and let her husband do all the talking and make all the decisions? No worry then that she’d ever want to take off with some cursed pirate and get herself kidnapped and killed and leave him and their child to go it alone.

She knew she wasn't being fair to her spinner. He didn't really want to live the life he'd dreamed of--he was too contented to have a safe and happy home life himself. He didn't want to leave her behind, he just wanted to share it with her. And she wanted that too. She was ready.

Her short, mannish nails drummed loudly on the wood of her desk. A ledger was open in front of her. She was supposed to be tallying the money that was finally starting to come back into her coffers. It was important work. She could hire someone else to do it but she liked to keep on top of such things herself and it wasn’t so hard. There was satisfaction in balancing the numbers and always knowing for herself exactly where the money was going and coming from.

But she was glad of the distraction from the work and the thoughts that were keeping her from it when there was a knock at her study door.

“Enter.”

The captain of the guard let himself in and she eased back in her seat to offer him her full attention.

He saluted. “Your grace. The pirates that have been troubling our merchant ships out of Rivenport were caught last night, trying to make landfall at Melford. The ship got away and most of the crew, but we caught the captain and his lady, when she came back to rescue him.”

She nodded.

“They were brought to Avonlea and the headman’s already sentenced them to execution in the morning. In the meantime they’re being held in one of the cells below the barracks.” He bowed. “They await your final judgment—or pardon, of course.”

She sighed. The power of life and death, the power to sentence a man or woman to such, was not something that rested easily on her. It was different in battle, with a sword in your hand and another at your throat, but to condemn a living person to die in the cold, clear-headed light of day was not something she enjoyed.

Her father hadn’t done it often: they’d been a rich land and could afford to be more forgiving of thievery than many, often paying out the price of a condemned thief’s bounty from the ducal coffers. There were more than a few soldiers that had returned to her ranks after the ogres had been banished who’d started out their career paying off a debt to her father.

But these days her purse was not so fat and she was practical enough to know that sometimes a show of strength was necessary. The pirates off their coast had been causing trouble they could no longer afford.

It wasn’t the distraction she would have hoped for. She started drumming her fingers again. “What’s the pirate’s name?”

“Jones, I believe,” her captain said, straightening with pride. Clearly he’d been waiting to boast. “Captain of the famed Jolly Roger.”

She straightened as well, suddenly leaning forward in her chair. “Jones you say? And a ‘lady?’”

 

* * *

 

Rumpel sent his regrets at dinnertime, saying he was too busy this evening to join her. For once she didn’t mind the time apart. It would allow her to slip down to the cell beneath the barracks and check on their temporary prisoners.

It wasn’t possible, what she was thinking. It would be far too big of a coincidence. But she had to go and find out for herself.

She did not expect to find that someone else had had the same suspicion and beaten her to the gate, already waiting inside the cell with a torch and the keys that should only have been available to her and her captain of the guard. But she supposed the captain knew well enough the only other person she’d have authorized to have access to the key to any door.

 

* * *

 

“So this is Milah,” she said, walking slowly into the cell through the door her spinner had carelessly left open. She’d been watching for a few moments from the shadows of the hall. He’d only managed a single muttered word before staggering back. A single muttered name, really. The other two were in chains but somehow he was the one who looked withdrawn and defeated. She didn’t care for that at all.

The pirate was handsome, his lady darkly beautiful. She couldn’t fault Rumpel’s taste in looks at least.

“Belle!” He turned on her in a panic, almost fumbling his cane.

She shot him an amused glance. What did he think she was going to do? More to the point, what had he been planning on doing?

She looked the other woman over and cocked a brow. “Well I like the outfit.”

The captive woman lifted her chin even higher, nothing but pride and determination reflected in her pale eyes, a sneer on her otherwise lovely lips. “So this is the duchess who fell in love with a lame, cowardly spinner.”

“Careful,” she said, waving a warning finger. “This is the woman who fell in love with the man you weren’t smart enough to appreciate. And, I might add, who now holds you and your—lover?—in chains. Say, you do look remarkably good for a woman who was stolen away as a plaything for a villainous pirate and his crew.”

The pirate in question chose then to pipe up, as lovely and charming as he could be. He shrugged modestly and raised a brow, smiling in a pathetically obvious effort to be endearing. “What can I say? I take good care of my playthings.”

Belle rolled her eyes and nodded her chin at her spinner. “Let her down.”

“Wha—”

She clapped Rumpel’s shoulder briefly but then moved closer to the pirate, taking her sword out and stroking his neck with the edge of her blade. He caught his breath, licked his lips, and cast a long, speaking look at his lady. The chains rattled as he fisted his hands around them but he didn’t try for any more charming repartee.

“Don’t try anything—unless you want to see him less an important extremity or two.” The artfully stubbled skin under the pirate’s jaw dented slightly at the prodding of her sword.

Rumpelstiltskin blinked at her, shifting uncomfortably. She smiled for him. “Don’t worry, Rumpel. I just think the ladies need to have a little talk alone. We can be civilized, can’t we?” This felt good. The flexing of atrophying muscles. Diplomacy over a blade, an exchange of hostages and parley. She hoped her enjoyment wasn’t too much in her eyes; it probably wouldn’t do much for her case that she was ready to settle down to a life of quiet domesticity.

Her spinner undid the chains on his former wife and Belle used her free hand to toss him a pair of manacles joined by a short, solid bar. The pirate queen raised her brows. “This doesn’t feel very civilized,” she noted as her former husband closed the new manacles around her wrists.

Belle smiled. “Are you kidding? This is the height of civilization. You can’t tell me it’s any different at sea.”

Milah watched her for a moment, then a small smile stretched her lips as well and she nodded. “Perhaps you’re right.”

Her rival restrained again Belle lowered her sword carefully from the pirate’s throat and she reached for Rumpel’s hand, lifting it for a kiss, her eyes never leaving the pirate queen’s. The kiss was a claim and a reminder.

“I recommend you wait outside the cell, sweetheart.” Also a claim. “Unless you really feel like talking it up with the pirate. Milah and I will only be gone a moment or two. Girl talk, you know.”

She gestured for the other woman to lead the way with her sword and followed her out of the cell.

“Wait! Milah!” The pirate called, rattling his chains again as he stretched away from the wall. He sounded so sincerely panicked she would have pitied him if she hadn’t held her spinner through a long, dark night as he’d confessed his deep shame at the pirate’s treatment when he’d stolen his wife. Tossing a sword at him, inviting him to fight for her as he clung to his staff, making him think it was die to defend his faithless wife and likely leave his son an orphan or abandon the mother of that son to rape, torture and death. The pirate had more than earned a little helpless fear on their account.

She guided her prisoner out into the moonlit training grounds and then sheathed her sword when they stood in the blue-white light of the high, full moon. Across the courtyard one of her guards leaned against the building, smoking a pipe. She nodded his way and he nodded back, dampening the small orange glow of his pipe and slipping back inside to give her privacy.

“Are you going to kill us? For Rumpel’s _honor_?” the other woman sneered.

She snorted. “What, do you think I’m a man? I hope I’m less a slave to base sentimentality than that. Besides, your lives are already forfeit for your piracy. I don’t need an excuse.”

“What do you want with me then?”

“How could you leave them?” she burst out. This woman was the reason her spinner wouldn’t take a chance on her. She was the reason he didn’t trust his feelings or hers to be enough. “How could you leave your husband and son? He said he thought there had been love between you once, that you had seemed to want a family with him before he was conscripted. He blames himself for all of it of course, the sweet fool, but how could you leave them?” She raked her hand through her hair.

“I wasn’t happy,” the other woman answered, softly but with determination that made it seem she’d had the answer ready. Practiced, as though she might have had the conversation before, if only with herself.

“You were his wife! Baelfire’s mother.”

“And you were your father’s daughter. Why should I have had to stay and be miserable to fulfill my obligation as a woman when you didn’t have to fulfill yours?”

Belle opened her mouth—then it snapped shut and her lips twisted. “You abandoned your son,” she said almost sullenly.

“To the man who loved him more than anything in the world. I knew Rumpel would raise him better than I would. Would you rather I had taken him with me?”

Silence fell between them for a while. Belle fought off a minor panic attack at the very thought of Rumpel losing his son. It would have destroyed him. They probably would never have met because he would never have survived the loss. Or…it could have been worse. The loss that broke the good heart that she adored so much. The Dark One’s dagger had been drawn to something in him, Zoso had said as much. If he’d not had Baelfire and the dagger had found and claimed him as it wished—

“Is—is he well?”

She could have pretended not to understand, still distracted by her spinner’s fate if he hadn’t had his son to build his life around. She would always believe that the way Milah had left had been the true cowardice. Especially now, since it seemed she’d gone with her pirate happily and deliberately left her husband to think she’d been stolen away to her death.

“He is,” she said instead. “Strong and clever and handsome. Brave. And so curious. He wants to know and see and experience everything—even if he doesn’t always have the patience to sit down to his books or lectures. You were right in that; Rumpel did a good job with him. He told me he has your looks.” She glanced sideways at the other woman who was trembling slightly, as though every word had been a blow. “I see now he was right. Though he has Rumpel’s eyes. But you’d remember that much at least.”

Milah sighed. Her head fell back and revealed tears turned to silver down her face as she fought for breath. She even cried beautifully. Belle felt shabby and small and tried to remind herself that their respective looks weren’t important. Milah had run off. Belle _never_ would.

“You speak as though you care for him, too.”

“I do. He’s a good boy.” Belle huffed and smiled a little at the thought of him catching her calling him a boy again. “A fine young man,” she corrected herself. “I taught him how to use a sword and ride. We’re still working on reading, writing, history, and strategy. Rumpel hasn’t liked the weapons training or talk of strategy but Bae loves it all, even when he whines about it, and he’s such a quick study. He’s a…a young man to be proud of.”

Milah sighed again and nodded. “I’m glad. If I’m going to die at least it’s good to know…it’s good to know my boy has a good life. Probably better than it would have been even if I had stayed.”

“No real way of knowing that,” Belle said sharply, though for her own sake, part of her could hope it was true. She’d like to think she offered him something. “But anyway, who says you’re going to die?”

The pirate queen turned to her, face cold and untrusting, chin raised for a blow. “I believe it was the headman of Avonlea. I could be wrong; he didn’t bother to introduce himself to the condemned.”

“Piracy is a hanging offence in this kingdom. In my family’s lands we’ve been known for leniency in the past but times are still hard here and people are less charitably disposed now than in our easier days. Goods and gold taken from us are dearer and harder to replace. Still, I don’t think I could look Bae in the eyes after allowing the death of his mother. Even if he does already think you’re dead.”

The pirate queen stiffened and the manacles on her wrists clacked loudly in the quiet courtyard. “What are you saying?”

Belle straightened and turned, meeting her gaze squarely. “I’m saying that my land can use allies. The sea has always been kind to us. Friendly pirates that avoid the ships that sail from our ports, that perhaps even warn other pirates away from our ports, well, it would be an extra kindness. A gesture of goodwill for pardoning a pirate queen—and harboring her abandoned son.”

“What do you know of pirates?” the other woman sneered.

“I know of the Jolly Roger, the swiftest ship on the seas. I know rumor has it that even other pirates flee before that particular ship. And I feel I can guess at the worth of a pirate king and queen in my humble dungeon.”

“What of Killian, then?”

Belle shrugged. “I’d feel no guilt facing Bae, knowing I allowed the death of the pirate who ran off with his mother and tore his family apart.”

“I won’t leave without him,” the other woman said angrily, leaning over Belle as though Belle would be intimidated by something of so little consequence as height.

She shrugged. “Really, that’s up to Rumpel. It’s the least I can offer him, all things considered. I don’t know how he’ll feel that I’m sparing you—” A lie. She knew damned well he wouldn’t want their blood on her hands, even if it was the captain of the guard who actually performed the executions. “—I should at least give him the choice concerning the man who made him a cuckhold. The one who’s here at any rate. Let’s rejoin our men and find out his opinion on it, hmm?”

She waved, this time with just her hand, and allowed the pirate queen, the former wife of the man she loved, to lead the way back to the dungeon cell where a pirate king stood in chains with the poor spinner he’d once bullied and abused.

 

* * *

 

They heard the ruckus from down the hall and the two women sped back into the room. They both froze at what they saw—the gentle spinner, half a head shorter than the chained pirate captain had his hands wrapped in the taller man’s collar and he shook him sharply, twisting and pulling the material of his shirt tight around his throat, choking him and slamming his head against the stone wall he was chained to.

The red-faced pirate fought for breath through gritted teeth, struggling for words he couldn’t quite get out.

Belle caught the pirate queen’s arm as she made to go to her love.

“Well!” Belle said. “Would you look at this. You just can’t leave men alone for a second, can you?”

The spinner’s head sank forward, just a bit. He released the pirate’s shirt, throwing his hands wide and literally staggering away. His cane had been discarded in the fray and lay against one wall.

Belle shot a warning look at the pirate queen but took a chance leaving her to retrieve the cane and hand it back to the panting, shamefaced spinner.

“I suppose I can take this as the answer to the question I was going to put to you.”

“No!” Milah said in a trembling voice. “You can’t kill him. I won’t let you.”

“What are you talking about?” Rumpelstiltskin asked, more than a little dazed.

She patted the hand that grasped the handle of the cane. “I told your lovely ex here that I’d leave her pirate’s fate up to you. It’s only fair. I don’t think we can let her be killed—she’s Bae’s mother, for all that came after. The pirate—”

“No!” the pirate queen said again, more firmly. “You won’t kill—”

“No, we won’t,” the spinner said quietly. Apparently to the surprise of everyone in the cell except for Belle. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want his blood on my hands. Or yours.” He turned his hand on the cane to grip hers back. Only she could feel the tremble in it. “I don’t want his life. I just want the two of you gone, away from us and _away from Baelfire_ ,” he said, turning with a snarl on the pirate.

“Now, I don’t think that’s up to you, mate. A boy should know his mother.”

“Killian,” his lady said warningly as the spinner left Belle to close on the pirate again. She could guess now what sort of talk had driven him to attack the bound man before but she only realized a second too late that they’d played into his hands.

She drew her sword but the pirate was already free of his chains—it was a good thing Bae hadn’t been raised by his mother and her pirate, as much of a natural as he already was—and had Rumpel’s small dagger at her spinner’s own throat, a wicked grin spread whitely below his flashing dark eyes.

His lady and long time accomplice was already at his side, out of her reach, while Belle's world quickly narrowed to a pinprick view of the blade against her lover’s skin.

“Drop it,” the pirate said and she didn’t hesitate to let her sword fall from her hand, not even wincing to hear the treasured weapon clang unhappily against the stone floor of the cell.

He laughed at her easy capitulation.

“If you hurt him there is no ocean wide enough, no shore far enough, that I won’t find you and make you wish yourself to Davy Jones long _long_ before I’m done with you.”

“Pretty words duchess,” he said, as Milah adeptly took the keys from the spinner’s pocket as though the manacles and iron bar connecting them were no hindrance, quickly freeing herself and casting her fetters aside. “I’ve heard about you. The adventuress. The soldier. And no stranger to a pirate ship yourself from what I understand." Milah shot him a startled look. "I don’t know how this pathetic coward keeps catching himself the most interesting of women.”

His words and tone were an obvious attempt at flattery but he dug the blade in a little and her spinner winced and she hissed, bracing herself for an attack she knew she didn’t dare to make. “But I can tell you this—he’s bugger all at keeping them. I’d be doing you a favor if I rid you of him now. Save you the inevitable disappointment he’ll be to you later.”

“You already took Baelfire’s mother from him, would you really take his father too?”

The pirate laughed as though she’d been talking to him. “Actually, I think we’ll take _him_ too. You’re right; it’s past time the boy got to reunite with his mother.”

“Bae!” Rumpel whispered, suddenly struggling against his captor, but it did no good, the larger, combat-trained man with the blade at his throat was unmoved, except that he tightened his grip and a thin trickle of blood dripped down the spinner’s spasming throat.

Belle was aware of it, but her eyes burned like fire into Milah’s. If she hadn’t been lying, if her tears hadn’t been false out in the courtyard, then this was not what she wanted either. If she’d ever really loved her son she wouldn’t wish death on the man she’d trusted to love and raise him.

The other woman’s face gave away nothing. She walked casually over to retrieve Belle’s sword and give it a few careful swings in the small space, testing the weight and balance.

“I gave my word we wouldn’t harm them,” she said as though to no one in particular. “On my honor.”

Her pirate frowned at her. “What?”

“When we were talking outside. I promised her that if she gave _her_ word not to harm either of us—” Her eyes flicked back to Belle’s. _Either of us_ : a claim and promise of her own. “And if she pardoned us from prosecution in her land, then we would become allies of her little holdings, promising to do no harm to her people and to generally let it be known at sea that they’re under our protection. Whatever else he is, Rumpel _is_ one of her people now.”

“But she didn’t give you that promise. I heard her: _my_ life was left to the hands of this cowardly fellow here.” He tightened his grip again and the spinner grunted, another small trail of blood oozing out to join the path of the first.

“I said I had to run it by Rumpel first,” Belle said. “ _He_ chose to spare _you_. Our deal was struck as soon he said as much.”

Milah tucked Belle’s sword in at her belt and nodded, making a show of picking at dirt under one of her nails.

“Well, _I_ never agreed to any of that!” the pirate all but whined.

“ _I_ did,” Milah said, suddenly fierce. “Or doesn’t _my_ word mean anything to you?”

His eyes had the panicked look of a man who knew he’d lost but didn’t want to admit it, but to his credit, the expression didn’t color the rest of his face. “A full pardon? We and our crew can walk down the street of any of your villages in full daylight, as though we’re just ordinary sailors and merchants? Partake in a pint at an inn? Bargain in your shops and markets?”

Belle nodded. “Weigh anchor in our docks with no questions and visit our healers and apothecaries without having to be sly about it or pay extra for the secrecy. _As long as my spinner doesn’t lose so much as_ one _more drop of blood._ ”

He nodded and finally loosened his grip a little. “Right. My lady’s word is our bond, true enough. Looks like you live to disappoint another one, after all, mate.” He wiggled the fingers of his free hand. “Shall we trade?”

At first she didn’t understand what he meant, since he was clearly making no effort to free her spinner, but the pirate queen seemed to know and pulled Belle’s own sword on her and used it to herd her in an awkward shuffle around the room that left her standing below the shackles that had recently held the two pirates while they now stood where she had, in front of the open cell door. She soon found herself chained against the wall in their place.

“No worries, love,” the pirate said, smirking. “We’ll hold to our bargain as long as you hold to yours. But just to make sure you have a bit of time to cool off—I mean, you wouldn’t want to tarnish your honor in a fit of rage over a little misunderstanding, hey?” He shoved Rumpel away from him and quickly stepped out of the cell, his lady slamming the barred door shut behind them, the lock engaging with a heavy _click_.

“See you around!” he said, as he turned and the pirate king and queen vanished up the stairs, hand in hand.

Belle exhaled deeply as Rumpel got ungracefully back to his feet and had to reach past her to where his cane had been kicked in the scuffling.

He was alright and she’d been in worse positions. There’d be teasing of course, and it would be well-deserved, letting herself be taken by a pair of pirates—and one of them her lover’s ex, God, that stung!—but when the guard came to take the prisoners to their execution in the morning, Belle and Rumpel would be discovered and freed, no real harm done.

“You were a pirate?” he asked at last, standing in front of her, his head low and his face hidden, his shoulders shaking lightly.

“ _That’s_ what you took from all of this?” she blurted out incredulously, but guilt and a sense of defeat quickly overtook her as the trembling of his shoulders didn’t abate at all. “I wasn’t really. More…a corsair. A privateer? We were sanctioned to attack enemy ships and capture their goods, it wasn’t about stealing—it…it was only for a little while,” she finished lamely. Good luck convincing him she was nothing like Milah now. A good, normal wife who’d sit by the hearth in a frilly dress, rocking a cradle, with tea and biscuits ready for her big strong husband’s return. She let herself slump against the wall, her head falling back with a comforting thud.

“Ah…Belle,” he sighed but the laughter in his voice had her looking back at him quickly. He’d been laughing. That seemed…odd.

“It—it was only for a few months, truly. Life at sea was fun for a while but it wasn’t how I wanted to spend the rest of my days.” She cocked her head as he shook his and grinned that crooked smile that always turned her soft.

He limped forward and cupped her cheek, resting his forehead against hers.

“Rumpel?”

“Belle, I love you,” he said, his voice low and rough and hushed in the quiet cell. “Everything I have is yours. I mean, since you’re the duchess and own these lands it really is all yours anyway. You’re clearly getting the worse of this but for some reason you seem to actually want me and the gods know I want you—”

“Wha—what? Rumpel, what are you saying?”

He laughed and it was such a joyful little sound she found herself chuckling softly in return though few moments in her life had ever felt less like a time for laughter. “Belle—will you marry me?”

For a moment she just shook her head, searching his eyes for some sign that she’d misheard or he’d somehow misspoke. “Yes,” was all she could manage to say, stupid, annoying tears welling in her eyes and choking her voice, but then he was kissing her so it didn’t matter if she couldn’t talk or if she was crying a little or if she was chained to a wall and they were both locked in a dungeon under her own garrison.

They were both laughing again when they finally broke apart from their kiss. His arms were around her, his hands spread across her skin, and it was frustrating that she couldn't do the same.

“So what exactly was it about seeing me roundly defeated by your ex-wife and her lover that convinced you it would be a good idea to marry me?” she teased, still catching her breath, snuggling her body into his as much as she could manage with her wrists manacled to the wall above her head.

He snorted and hugged her. “You weren’t defeated at all, my brave hero.” He nipped at her neck, nuzzling along under her ear until she shivered, not quite able to believe he could do this to her in a prison of all places. “You laid down your arms because he threatened me. It was…it was the idea that I could die before we’d ever had a chance—that I would never be able to call you my wife because I was too afraid to take the risk. I wasn’t safer for not marrying you, just lonelier and sadder.”

She swallowed. She wasn’t brave enough herself to get into all that. The thought that he could have died—no. She wasn’t ready to discuss that possibility yet. Instead she focused on the other, rattling her chains to punctuate her words. “Since the pirates are running free and I’m chained to the wall I don’t know what to call it other than defeat. Though your agreement to finally marry me is a fine consolation.”

He grinned, the most beautiful sight in the world, she was certain. “It’s just a minor setback. No more than the work of a moment to get you free," he said lightly.

“The work of a moment, but we have to wait until one of my men comes down here at dawn to do it. I’ve gone soft,” she muttered, glaring at the bars across from her only because there wasn’t a mirror that would allow her to glare at herself. “Not long ago I would never have gone anywhere without at least a pair of pins in my hair, but the life of a duchess has made me lazy. Unless you have a set of lock picks on _you_ , I’m out of luck. Defeated by my own prison.”

His expression was so strangely shy and guilty as he reached into the lining of his waistcoat, that she stood up a little and turned her head to him suspiciously.

“You don’t have a set of lock picks on you—”

But if that wasn’t what was suddenly in his hands as he reached above her for the shackles on her wrist then she was more addled by the night’s events than she’d thought. “How do you have lockpicks?—And know how to use them?” she added, when the first manacle _snicked_ open as quickly as if he held the key.

“One of the few useful things my wastrel of a father taught me,” he said, determinedly not meeting her eyes as he focused on freeing her other wrist. “I…uhm…never go anywhere without them.”

Which she was sure was not a dig at her for not being as prepared but the words still stung. She comforted herself by wrapping her hands in his hair and rising up on her feet to kiss him again, happily distracted.

She giggled when they came up for air, slightly squished against the wall since he couldn’t hold her and his cane and had been leaning rather heavily against her. “You know, I understand some people really go for the dungeon thing but I prefer the creature comforts to cold stone, myself. Since you’ve got the ‘keys,’ can you do the honors?” She nodded towards the cell door.

He grinned and kissed the corner of her mouth, then stood away, retrieved his cane, and bowed to her. “As my lady wishes,” he said, before turning and slipping his hands between the bars to work on the lock by feel alone.

She practically bounced to stand beside him. “Your lady- _wife_ ,” she corrected, feeling like she was floating and delighted and ready to burst.

“Soon,” he promised, turning for a moment to toss her another grin.

“ _Very_ soon.”

He laughed, the lock clicking loudly and the door swinging open as he carefully tucked his picks away, claiming her hand and kissing the back of it. “Very soon,” he agreed softly, standing aside to let her out of the cell ahead of him.

She’d taken two steps towards the stairs when she stopped so abruptly he ran into the back of her and had to brace himself with a hand on her shoulder. “Wha—”

“Baelfire!”

“What?”

“You taught Baelfire how to pick locks and undo knots, didn’t you? That’s why he was such a ‘natural’ at it!”

She turned on him and he shrugged. “It’s not much of a legacy but it is about all my father left me with. That and how to play a rousing game of ‘find-the-lady.’”

“That little sneak,” she muttered, shaking her head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next...I'm not saying yet. I might change my mind. But there should be one more chapter more or less about the wedding, and a surprise guest. Then an epilogue about Bae.


End file.
